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Anonymous ID: 44b37c Aug. 4, 2022, 3:16 a.m. No.16995187   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>5413

Over 400,000 High-Priority Incidents In Chicago In 2021 Had 'No Police Available To Send', New Data Shows

 

As crime continues to roil economic and social life in post-George Floyd, post-Covid Chicago, getting policing and criminal justice right are crucial. City officials are failing at that task.

 

We’re already seen anemic rates of arrest and prosecutions in Chicago, accompanied by finger-pointing between politicians over crime and the court system. And years of no support from city leadership, anti-policing legislation and the damaging rhetoric of the “defund” movement have taken a toll on Chicago police morale and manpower.

 

All that has spread the police force so thin that, in 2021, one of law enforcement’s most basic functions, responding to high-priority emergency service calls in a timely manner, was regularly beyond their capacity.

 

New data uncovered by Wirepoints through public records requests to the Chicago Police Department (CPD) reveal that in 2021 there were 406,829 incidents of high-priority emergency service calls for which there were no police available to respond.

 

That was 52 percent of the 788,000 high-priority 911 service calls dispatched in 2021.

 

High priority calls include Priority Level 1 incidents, which represent “an imminent threat to life, bodily injury, or major property damage/loss,” and Priority Level 2 incidents when “timely police action…has the potential to affect the outcome of an incident.”

 

In pre-George Floyd, pre-COVID 2019, there were only 156,016 such instances for which dispatchers had no police available to send – 19 percent of the total number of high priority 911 service calls made that year. We have requested parallel data for 2020.

 

The 2021 high priority numbers include, among many other calls:

 

14,955 – assaults in progress.

17,828 – batteries in progress.

16,350 – person with a gun.

5,210 – person with a knife.

12,787 – shots fired (reports from people, not the city’s automated “Shotspotter”)

1,352 – person shot.

887 – person stabbed.

14,265 – domestic battery.

Nor were there police available for 49,686 domestic disturbances or 9,458 mental health disturbances. Or 3,386 dispatches for a robbery that had just occurred. Or the 2,427 dispatches about someone threatening suicide and the 2,951 dispatches stemming from reported violations of a court protection order. (For the full list of service calls, see the CPD’s FOIA response below).

 

Emergency police dispatches and call backlogs

 

Chicago police handled about 1.3 million dispatched 911 calls for service each year between 2019 and 2021. The data comes from a dashboard kept by the city’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG). OIG numbers come straight from the Office of Emergency Operations and Communications, which runs the city’s 911 center.

 

About 800,000 of the calls for service each year are high priority (priorities 1 and 2), about 60 percent of the total.

 

https://wirepoints.org/new-2021-chicago-data-shows-400000-high-priority-incidents-where-dispatchers-had-no-police-available-to-send-wirepoints/