Here's Where NYers Wait Longest For Police To Send Help

NEW YORK — Some New Yorkers wait more than eight minutes before cops are even assigned to respond to a crime while others wait less than two mintues, a new report shows.

The analysis, released Thursday by the city's Independent Budget Office, revealed stark disparities across the city's 77 NYPD precincts in average dispatch times, or how long it takes a police dispatcher to assign cops to a possible crime in progress.

When residents of the 47th Precinct in the north Bronx called 911 to report a crime in the 2018 fiscal year, about eight minutes went by before cops were even assigned to to the incident, according to the figures. But that same task took just about 1.6 minutes in the 100th Precinct covering part of Queens's Rockaway peninsula.

The 47th Precinct wasn't the only part of The Bronx that faced long waits. The borough is home to six of the nine precincts across the city where the average dispatch time was longer than five minutes, the IBO says.

And the Boogie Down's average response time in the 2018 fiscal year was 5.6 minutes — far above the citywide average of 3.8 minutes, the report shows. The citywide figure was up from just three minutes in 2014, according to the figures.

Dispatch times have gotten worse in The Bronx despite the fact that the number of "crime-in-progress incidents" in the borough increased less quickly than the rest of the city from 2014 through 2018, the IBO says. It has also seen a faster increase in the number of uniformed cops than other areas in that time, according to the report.

But Bronx residents aren't the only ones forced to watch time tick by after calling 911. Midtown North's 18th Precinct had an average dispatch time of 6.98 minutes in fiscal year 2018, tied for third-worst in the city, the figures show.

Brooklyn's worst precinct was Flatbush's 67th, which had the city's fifth-longest average dispatch time of 6.27 minutes, according to the report.

Cutting down response times to 911 calls is an NYPD priority, said Sgt. Jessica McRorie, a department spokeswoman. The Police Department's response to "crimes in progress and critical crimes in progress" has dropped year over year since 2014, she said.

"Safety is a shared responsibility and we encourage individuals to call 911 when there is an emergency," McRorie said in a statement. "The NYPD will continue to work closely with members of the community to in order to make every New York City neighborhood safe."

Here are the precincts with the 10 longest average dispatch times in 2018, according to the IBO. Read the full report here to see how your precinct fared.

1. 47th Precinct (Bronx) — 8.03 minutes
2. 44th Precinct (Bronx) — 7.7 minutes
3. 18th Precinct (Manhattan) and 49th Precinct (Bronx) — 6.98 minutes
4. 46th Precinct (Bronx) — 6.5 minutes
5. 67th Precinct (Brooklyn) — 6.27 minutes
6. 48th Precinct (Bronx) — 6.07 minutes
7. 42nd Precinct (Bronx) — 5.83 minutes
8. 14th Precinct (Manhattan) — 5.05 minutes
9. 66th Precinct (Brooklyn) — 4.95 minutes
10. 71st Precinct (Brooklyn) — 4.93 minutes