Response Times (945A/23)
Request
I would like to know the average police response times for Grade 2 priority calls for the past three calendar years (2022, 2021, 2020), broken down by local authority area.
Please could you also provide the target response time for Grade 2 priority calls for your police force.
Response
Please find attached our response.
Please note: We do not use averages in policing because there are significant outliers which distort the figures.
In West Midlands Police and other forces, we use median response times because these provide a much more accurate picture of our calls for service and how these have been met. A response time is made up of numerous data sets, for instance, the time taken to answer the 999 call, the quantity of time that Dispatch take to allocate an officer and finally, the travel time of the officer to make it to the incident. These figures all contribute to the overall response time.
Grading our responses to calls for service from the public ensures that we prioritise the calls where people are in immediate danger or if a crime is in progress.
We use the THRIVE model when grading our calls for service. This means that we assess the Threat, Harm, Risk, Investigation, Vulnerability and Engagement (THRIVE) of the incident. We use this model to assess the most appropriate police response.
It allows a judgement to be made of the relative risk posed by the call and places the individual needs of the victim at the centre of that decision. When grading our calls as P2, we ensure that the caller is in no immediate danger or immediate threat.
The figures show incidents that were eventually dealt with as a P2. However, they may have initially been graded as lower than a P2 and may have been upgraded due to a change in circumstances, as we constantly reassess our calls based on the THRIVE model.
A response time is made up of numerous data sets, for instance, the time taken to answer the 999 or 101 call, the quantity of time that dispatch take to allocate an officer and finally, the travel time of the officer to make it to the incident.
As part of our ongoing commitment to protecting the public, preventing crime and to supporting the most vulnerable within our communities we have made improvements into how we prioritise and attend our calls for service.
Under our new operating model which came into effect in April 2023 we now have Response teams based locally, who have responsibility for attending P2 incidents.
These means that there is a local focus on calls for service rather than it being a centralised function, Teams are locally based and their focus is on attending the most urgent calls to the most vulnerable people.
The call demand and P2 logs are discussed and reviewed every day and officers from other teams can be brought in to support when needed.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.