Measure Description
These measures track the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) and Emergency Management (DEM) response times to priority A, B, and C calls. Priority calls are defined as follows:
Why these measures are important
Reporting on these measures provides the public, elected officials, and city staff with a snapshot of SFPD’s response time to the highest priority calls for emergency assistance. The response time can be the difference between safety and disaster, whether the harm is bodily or property in nature. Changes in these response times are reviewed by the SFPD to determine if police response to emergency situations can be improved.
The interactive chart below shows presents the response rate to these calls.
The chart's legend is below:
- Y-axis: Response Time (in Minutes)
- X-Axis: Months within the calendar year
Response to Priority Calls
How performance is measured
Monthly response time is measured using the “median” of response times in a month for a given priority level. The data source for this measurement is the SFPD dispatched calls for service data set, linked below in the Data notes and source section. The collected data median is the middle response time when all response times are ordered from shortest to longest.
A median, otherwise known as the 50th percentile, reports the response time at which exactly 50% of the data is above the reported response time and 50% is below. Median is less sensitive to extreme outliers than mean.
For example, the set of numbers: {1, 1, 3, 4, 40} has a median of 3 and an average of 9.8.
The process flow for response time is shown below:
DEM and the SFPD jointly report Response Time as the time from when the 9-1-1 call is received by a DEM call taker to when the first officer arrives on-scene. This segment more fully reflects the experience of the citizen.
Data
Primary monthly data source: Scorecards Dataset on DataSF.
Additional Information
- Read about SFPD dispatched calls for service on DataSF
City Performance Scorecards
This page is part of the City Performance Scorecards.
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