Residents in Long Island City and surrounding neighborhoods who call 911 wait the longest out of anyone in Queens before dispatch sends out police officers, data shows.
The 108th Precinct — based in Long Island City and also patrolling nearby Sunnyside, Woodside and West Maspeth — takes an average of 3.72 minutes to send out a car, according to data compiled by the city’s Independent Budget Office.
The data, which was culled from dispatch data in the Mayor’s Office of Management Budget, does not show how long it takes the police department to actually respond to a 911 call — from the initial call to the time officers arrive at the scene. What it does show is dispatch time – the number of minutes it takes for a police dispatcher to find and assign officers to respond to a possible crime in progress, localized for different precincts for the fiscal year 2018.
But it’s not all bad news for Queens residents.
The borough also contains the fastest precinct response time in the city. The 100th Precinct in the Rockaways took an average of 1.57 minutes to send out a car. On the whole, the borough has one of the speediest dispatch times in the city with an average of 2.67 minutes, coming in second overall after Staten Island.
In fact, even the 108th Precinct’s dispatch time is faster than the city’s average of 3.8 minutes. The Bronx is the outlier of the data set, driving up the city average with an average of 5.36 minutes. Across the city, nine precincts had crime in progress dispatch times greater than 5 minutes. Six of those precincts were in the Bronx.
The study also notes that the New York Police Department has not provided the City Council with quarterly reports on police response time disaggregated by borough, precinct, and the three daily police shifts even though they are required to do so under Local Law 89 of 1991. Such data would allow the public to see how long it takes between the 911 call and the police’s arrival to the scene.
Here are the Queens precincts with the five longest dispatch times:
- 108th Precinct (Long Island City) – 3.72 minutes
- 104th Precinct (Ridgewood, Glendale, Maspeth, Middle Village) – 3.42 minutes
- 105th Precinct (Queens Village, Laurelton, Cambria Heights and other southeast Queens neighborhoods) – 3.4 minutes
- 102nd Precinct (Kew Gardens, Ozone Park, Richmond Hill, Woodhaven) – 3.2 minutes
- 115th Precinct (Corona, East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights) – 3.07 minutes
“The NYPD response to crimes in progress and critical crimes in progress has gone down year-over-year since 2014,” an NYPD spokesperson said in a statement. “Reducing response times to 911 calls is a priority of the NYPD so officers can provide assistance, initiate an investigation or render aide. Safety is a shared responsibility and we encourage individuals to call 911 when there is an emergency. The NYPD will continue to work closely with members of the community to in order to make every New York City neighborhood safe.”
