Budget cuts will affect police service to those who need it most

Like so many other cities, Kansas City is facing an economic downturn due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Kansas City Missouri Police Department, along with all other City departments, is being asked to identify 4.5% of our budget that could be cut. For us, that’s about $10.5 million. We know that we will have to make sacrifices like everyone else, and we are actively working on the best ways to do that.

Typically, between 85% and 90% of our budget goes to personnel costs, so personnel would have to comprise a majority of the cuts. We already had dozens of open positions that will not be filled. We are not starting the next scheduled Academy class, and probably will cancel the next three classes.

What’s particularly unfortunate about canceling the next 30-member class is that it was to consist of 50% minority recruits. Our Employment Unit had done an excellent job recruiting people who reflect our community and come from diverse backgrounds. We hope they still will want to serve Kansas City when revenues allow them to. We typically have three to four Academy classes per year to keep up with attrition.

The problem with reducing personnel is that it inevitably means service gets reduced. Below is a heat map of where our 911 calls originated in the first half of 2020 (Jan. 1 – June 30). The darker blue areas showed where the most people called police for help. If you’re at all familiar with the socioeconomic make-up of our city, you will see that the most 911 calls come from the most impoverished areas of our city. Reducing police personnel will reduce service to the most economically disadvantaged of our residents. They are the ones who request our help the most, and they are ultimately the ones who potentially will suffer the most from reduced police staffing. (Click to see the map full size.)

Reduced officers on the street will lead to longer response times, an increased workload for those who remain, less personnel to devote to investigations and less time to engage in community policing efforts. And residents won’t just feel reduced staffing on the streets; they’ll feel it on the phone, too. Staffing shortages in our Communications Unit will lead to being put on hold when calling 911. This is an issue we have worked very hard to resolve since I became Chief by increasing Communications Unit staffing. No one should have to be put on hold during a life-or-death emergency.

We will do everything we can to provide the best service possible while working within budgetary constraints. Current fiscal realities mean prioritizing what residents need most and what can be reduced citywide. Those realities should be balanced with the increasing need for public safety in Kansas City.

Send comments to kcpdchiefblog@kcpd.org. 

Budget request echoes community concerns

Last week, our department submitted our requested budget for Fiscal Year 2018-19 (which would begin May 1, 2018) to the City Manager’s Office. Ultimately, the City Council will vote on this request, as well as those from all other city departments. Our proposed budget contains requests to fund everything from fuel to employee health insurance, but there are a few major items I want to share with you.

They are requests to fund 21 new dispatcher positions and 30 new patrol officer positions. We realize this is a request for additional tax dollars, and there are many other needs in the city, as well. But with our current staffing, we are unable to provide the kind of service taxpayers expect, so I believe these additional positions would be a very wise investment. These requests have been echoed by the community.

Dispatchers

Many people are put on hold when they call 911 because our Communications Unit is under-staffed. The average 911 hold time for our department increased from 26 seconds in August to 30 seconds in September. This is unacceptable to both the Kansas City Missouri Police Department and the community we serve. When you call 911 in a crisis, you should get an immediate response. During the public forums for the Chief of Police selection process this past summer and the meet-and-greets I’ve attended this fall, residents have told me over and over again how concerned they are about being put on hold when calling 911. It’s a major community concern, and it should be.

We are hiring and processing as many people as we can to get our numbers back up to where they should be, but our current budgeted positions are not enough, according to a staffing study and national public safety telecommunication organizations. Twenty-one new dispatcher positions would cost $1,071,000 in FY 2018-19. I firmly believe that is a very wise investment for timely response to emergencies. While these additional dispatcher positions would bring us more in line with comparable cities, we would still remain on the high side of number of calls per dispatcher, compared to those cities and national standards.


Officers

For the last two years, as our officer numbers have decreased to stay within budget, our response times have increased, peaking at a citywide average of 9 minutes and 20 seconds for Priority 1 calls in November 2016. We’ve been working to bring them down since then. With some Academy classes coming through, we’re back to an average of about 8 minutes citywide, but some areas like North Patrol Division still experience an average of 9 and a half minutes for a response in an emergency. I also know many people in our city with lower-priority calls like home burglaries and non-injury accidents wait hours for a police response. That is not acceptable to KCPD or the community we serve, either.

After consulting with the Patrol Bureau, we determined 30 additional patrol officer positions are the minimum we need to improve response times. More than 30 officers would be very beneficial, as well, but we are cognizant of the other budgetary needs of the City and therefore limited our request in this proposed budget. Patrol officers are the backbone of this department, and in my view, everything else KCPD does is to support the patrol function. Also included in our budget is a request to civilianize several analytical positions on the department so those officers can get back in the field, as well.

For this year, those new officers would not come on until mid-year after other Academy classes have graduated, so our request for these officers in FY 2018-19 would cost $720,000. Again, we believe that is a small price to pay for the timely police service taxpayers expect and deserve.


Technology

What is not requested in this budget but should be on everyone’s radar are our technology needs. Many of our major technological systems are 10 or more years old and coming to the end of their life cycles, including in-car cameras and computers, E-ticketing machines, and our portable radio system. Replacement of the radio system alone is estimated to be $9 million and must happen within the next four years. The decision of whether to implement body cameras also will be steered by whether we have updated in-car camera and computer systems that could be compatible with them. It’s a logical progression.

I want the community to know that we are working to address the issues of timely 911 and patrol officer response, as well as the technology that makes those responses possible, like in-car computers. I look forward to working with the City staff and City Council in providing improved police service to the people of Kansas City while keeping in mind all of the city’s other needs, as well.

Send comments to kcpdchiefblog@kcpd.org

911 Call Center staffing is a very high priority

9-1-1 is the public’s literal life-line, and I take our responsibility to respond to and manage that life-line very seriously. The call-takers and dispatchers of the KCPD take calls and dispatch not just for police, but also for EMS, the Fire Department and Animal Health and Safety. The women and men sitting in our call center are the first first responders to every life and safety need in this city, and they are seriously over-worked.

Due to staffing issues that existed before I came into the Chief’s position, all of our call-takers and dispatchers are working mandatory overtime. From the beginning of the year to Sept. 15, about 70 people have worked 11,360 hours of overtime. They’re missing family events, aren’t able to pick up their children from school and are burning out. That amount of additional work in a job that is already high-stress is causing substantial turn-over, creating more of a staffing crisis.

What that means for the public is that you can be put on hold when you call 911. For the month of July 2017, the average hold time was 24 seconds. No one is satisfied with wait times for 911. We want that response to be without delay all of the time. That is the community’s expectation, and it is ours, too. And we are working toward that.

The recent Matrix staffing study recommended we hire seven more Communications Unit staff – that is add seven more positions. We have 14 vacant positions at present, so that would be 21 more people than we have now. (I’ll periodically be highlighting here how we’re acting on the other recommendations of the Matrix study.) Based on recommendations from national public safety telecommunications organizations, we believe that number should be higher than what Matrix recommended.

We’ve been out in the community recruiting and have conducted dozens and dozens of interviews with potential candidates. If you are interested in this very important and interesting work, please check out the job description and where you can apply! We welcome any inquiries.

But if we hire 100 people tomorrow, it would still be some time before the Communications Unit is fully staffed. A call-taker must undergo 13 weeks of training before being able to operate independently. To become a dispatcher, call-takers must undergo an additional 16 weeks of training.

So in the short-term, we are doing a number of things to reduce 911 hold times and mandatory overtime. We are working to bring in experienced part-time and contract call-takers and dispatchers. There also are several members on our department who used to work in the Communications Unit but have moved onto other jobs. We have offered them refresher training and courses on our new computer-aided dispatching (CAD) system so they can do voluntary overtime. I really appreciate those department members stepping up. Some of them haven’t been in the call center for more than 20 years, but they still had the skillset, saw a need, and they volunteered to meet it.

In 2016, our Communications Unit answered 1,202,589 calls. While we also have a great need for more officers, getting the Communications Unit adequately staffed is one of my highest priorities right now, and the Board of Police Commissioners have indicated it’s theirs, as well.

If you or someone you know has ever thought about having an exciting, rewarding career that directly serves others, please consider being a communications professional with the state’s largest law enforcement agency. Again, here’s how to apply.

Send comments to kcpdchiefblog@kcpd.org. 

A refresher on call prioritization

I posted the below blog two years ago, but it bears repeating, so I'd like to share it again. The stats in it have remained pretty steady. We continue to receive complaints that officers don't respond to lower-priority calls as fast as residents would like. We must allocate our resources efficiently, and deploy them when and where they're most needed. Here's the blog I originally posted in August 2013:

We sometimes hear complaints that police don’t respond as quickly as people expect to certain types of incidents. The most common complaints are for calls about burglaries, car break-ins and non-injury accidents. We have a finite number of officers, so we must prioritize calls in which someone’s life or safety is at risk. Our policy very clearly outlines what types of calls receive priority, but here’s a little more succinct version that our dispatchers follow:

Priority 10: Assist the officer, send immediately

Priority 11 – 13: Calls where there is imminent danger to a person’s welfare (always lights and sirens on), send immediately

Priority 20: Calls where there is a potential danger to a person’s welfare (lights and sirens on if the incident is currently in progress), send within 2 minutes

Priority 30: Calls where the quality of the police response may be degraded if there is a delay, send within 5 minutes

Priority 40: Calls where a delay is acceptable

Priority 50: Calls where a delay of up to 4 hours is acceptable

Last month, July 2013, our median response time for Priority 10 calls (encompassing 10-13) was 7.42 minutes, and it was 9.78 minutes for Priority 20 calls. This is the time from the moment a 911 call is received to the moment an officer arrives on scene.

Consider this snapshot in time: at 10:15 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2013, there were 13 units (police cars manned by one or two officers) working in the Central Patrol Division. None were free to take any calls. All were tied up, responding to the following: two assaults, two injury crashes, a stabbing, investigating a suspicious person report, meeting an ambulance, meeting with someone who found a child reported missing and transporting an endangered person to a domestic violence shelter. Another had to testify in court. Two calls were in queue waiting to be dispatched whenever an officer became available. One was a 911 hang-up, and the other was a non-residential burglary.

Although it was a Priority 30 call that was to be dispatched within 5 minutes, the burglary caller had been waiting 65 minutes for police to arrive. I understand that person was probably frustrated. I know victims of property crimes often feel violated and scared, but it would be irresponsible for police to respond to their calls for service before a call in which someone’s safety is currently being threatened. It’s not because what happened to the burglary victim is not important, but like any organization, we must manage our resources as efficiently and responsibly as possible.

As we work to continue improving relationships with the community, it’s important that we keep expectations realistic. Police can’t always show up to non-emergency situations as soon as residents prefer, but we do our best to help those who need us most as quickly as possible. 

Send comments to kcpdchiefblog@kcpd.org.

Understanding Call Prioritization

We sometimes hear complaints that police don’t respond as quickly as people expect to certain types of incidents. The most common complaints are for calls about burglaries, car break-ins and non-injury accidents. We have a finite number of officers, so we must prioritize calls in which someone’s life or safety is at risk. Our policy very clearly outlines what types of calls receive priority, but here’s a little more succinct version that our dispatchers follow:

Priority 10: Assist the officer, send immediately

Priority 11 – 13: Calls where there is imminent danger to a person’s welfare (always lights and sirens on), send immediately

Priority 20: Calls where there is a potential danger to a person’s welfare (lights and sirens on if the incident is currently in progress), send within 2 minutes

Priority 30: Calls where the quality of the police response may be degraded if there is a delay, send within 5 minutes

Priority 40: Calls where a delay is acceptable

Priority 50: Calls where a delay of up to 4 hours is acceptable

Last month, July 2013, our median response time for Priority 10 calls (encompassing 10-13) was 7.42 minutes, and it was 9.78 minutes for Priority 20 calls. This is the time from the moment a 911 call is received to the moment an officer arrives on scene.

Consider this snapshot in time: at 10:15 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 20, there were 13 units (police cars manned by one or two officers) working in the Central Patrol Division. None were free to take any calls. All were tied up, responding to the following: two assaults, two injury crashes, a stabbing, investigating a suspicious person report, meeting an ambulance, meeting with someone who found a child reported missing and transporting an endangered person to a domestic violence shelter. Another had to testify in court. Two calls were in queue waiting to be dispatched whenever an officer became available. One was a 911 hang-up, and the other was a non-residential burglary.

Although it was a Priority 30 call that was to be dispatched within 5 minutes, the burglary caller had been waiting 65 minutes for police to arrive. I understand that person was probably frustrated. I know victims of property crimes often feel violated and scared, but it would be irresponsible for police to respond to their calls for service before a call in which someone’s safety is currently being threatened. It’s not because what happened to the burglary victim is not important, but like any organization, we must manage our resources as efficiently and responsibly as possible.

As we work to continue improving relationships with the community, it’s important that we keep expectations realistic. Police can’t always show up to non-emergency situations as soon as residents prefer, but we do our best to help those who need us most as quickly as possible. 

Send comments to kcpdchiefblog@kcpd.org. 

Making 911 Call Center staffing a priority

When I was appointed chief last October, one of the units on this department most vital to public safety was inadequately staffed. Our Communications Unit, which handles all 911 calls in Kansas City, was down 24 people. We had been under a hiring freeze since a $15 million budget cut in 2008, but I knew those were positions that had to be filled.

I made those positions a priority, and I am happy to report that we have hired 14 call-takers since November. Nine of them have completed their training and are on the job full-time, and the remaining five will join them soon.

These call-takers are the first people you have contact with in an emergency. They handle all manners of stressful and life-or-death situations with professionalism. We conduct frequent quality assurance checks on them, and they consistently perform admirably. They handled more than 843,000 calls in 2011.

These call-takers and dispatchers have been professional and effective in spite of incredible demands that have been placed upon them the last few years during the hiring freeze. To prevent 911 callers from being placed on hold for long periods of time, our call-takers and dispatchers have been forced to work mandatory overtime. In 2011, they put in more than 10,000 hours of overtime to make up for being short-staffed. This has been a big strain on the employees.

With the high levels of turn-over in a stressful, 24/7 job like this, we still are down 14 positions. I hope that by continuing to work toward fully staffing the Communications Unit, we can ease some of the burden our dispatchers and call-takers have taken on to protect this city. In the mean time, I want them to know I appreciate everything they do.

Send comments to kcpdchiefblog@kcpd.org.

Setting goals for better response times

We track a lot of performance measures, but one that the public feels most acutely is response times. The time between when someone calls 911 and help arrives may just be a few minutes, but it can feel like an eternity. We are dedicated to getting our officers to the public’s aid as quickly as possible, which is why we’re implementing new goals for response times.

We have now reduced our goal from Priority 1 calls to 7 minutes (down from 10 minutes). The new goal for priority 2 calls is now 9 minutes (down from 12 minutes). These measure from the time someone places a call to 911 to the time an officer arrives on scene.

Priority 1 calls are those that present extreme, known or potential danger to human life. These include officer-assist incidents, shootings, injury accidents, explosions, rape, robbery, hold-up alarms and calls in which the nature is not known. Priority 2 calls are those for which the potential for injuries to occur exists but has not yet happened, such as prowlers, burglaries, bomb threats and disturbances.

We wanted our new response time goals to show how important it is to us that officers arrive at emergencies as quickly as possible. We also want the goals to more accurately reflect our performance. It is incredibly rare that it takes officers 10 minutes to respond to a Priority 1 call. In December 2011, we met the 7-minute goal for Priority 1 calls 79 percent of the time. Our median response time was 7.67 minutes.

KCPD began tracking response times in 2000. A lot of things have an impact on them, such as road conditions, weather, and how many officers are in training or out sick. Generally, response times are shorter in the inner-city patrol divisions and higher in the suburban patrol divisions. This is because the suburban divisions are geographically much larger than those in the urban core, so officers in the suburbs face longer drives to get to their calls for service.

In November 2011, we changed the way we track response times. We were tracking the time from when the 911 call-taker transferred the call to the police dispatcher, but now start tracking from the earlier time of when the call is received by the 911 call-taker. (When someone calls 911 in Kansas City, Mo., they first talk to a call-taker. That call-taker gathers the information from the caller and inputs it into our computer-aided dispatching system. The dispatcher then takes that information and relays it to officers on the street by radio. The officers also see some of the information call-takers and dispatchers have input into the computer system.) We wanted to ensure we were tracking the appropriate number and were transparent with our performance in that area, so as of November 2011, we have corrected our computer system to track response times from the second someone calls 911 (this even includes any time the caller might be put on hold).

Send comments to kcpdchiefblog@kcpd.org.

Police launch revamped 911 Call Center by tweeting all dispatched calls for one hour

PRESS RELEASE:

The Kansas City Missouri Police Department will launch their new 911 Call Center be tweeting all dispatched activity from 11 a.m. to noon Thursday.

The 911 Call Center has been undergoing renovations for nearly a year. The upgrades have been to accommodate the new city-wide radio system, which is set to go live Nov. 9. It replaces 15-year-old technology. With the old system, police could not easily communicate with neighboring law enforcement agencies. KCPD’s dispatchers had to call other agencies’ dispatchers and have them relay that information to their officers on their own radio system.

“We will have inter-operability with our sister agencies,” said Steve Hoskins, KCPD’s Communications Unit Manager. “Now we have the availability to work an incident together anywhere from western Johnson County to eastern Independence with the shared resources we’ll have available.”

The Call Center itself features upgraded consoles for calltakers and dispatchers, who must stay at their stations for long periods of time during 8- or 12-hour shifts. It also has a new video system which allows dispatchers to see live feed through KC SCOUT Traffic Cameras, security cameras set up throughout the city, weather reports, news broadcasts and more so they can better support officers in the field.

To celebrate the new 911 Call Center and demonstrate KCPD’s call volume (the Call Center received 892,283 911 calls in 2010), police will tweet every call that officers are dispatched to between 11 a.m. and noon Thursday on the police department’s Twitter account, @kcpolice or www.twitter.com/kcpolice.

How to call 911

It may seem silly to instruct someone how to dial a three-digit number most of us have known for decades, but it really does make a difference to know the best way to contact police in an emergency. This video explains why.



Send comments to kcpdchiefblog@kcpd.org.

70 percent of KC 911 calls now come from wireless phones

Statistics are in from our Communications Center for 2010, and they’re pretty impressive. We handled a total of 892,283 calls, of which 576,257 were 911 calls (the rest were non-emergency calls and transfers to other department elements or other outside agencies). That total is a slight increase over last year, in which we handled 881,214 calls.

The numbers that really reflect the times are how many wireless 911 calls we receive compared to landline 911 calls. We started tracking this in 2008. That year, 60 percent of all our 911 calls came from wireless phones. That increased to 65.6 percent in 2009, and in 2010 the number was 70.5 percent.

In just two years, the percentage of 911 callers using cell phones has climbed by 10 percentage points. That’s a pretty remarkable change in a short amount of time, and it requires more of 911 callers. With landlines, dispatchers can trace where calls are coming from. Cell phones can’t pinpoint locations with the same precision. That’s why the Mid-America Regional Council makes these suggestions about calling 911 from a cell phone:

“It is very important that you provide as much information as possible to the dispatcher. This includes:

• Your wireless phone number
• Your exact location
• The name of the road you are traveling on, direction you are headed and any physical landmarks
• How many miles you are from the nearest town or the nearest cross street.

Technology in use in the Kansas City region allows dispatchers to receive the phone number and approximate location from where the wireless 9-1-1 call originated. But it is still important to know your exact location in the event of an emergency. Make it a habit to note mile markers and other road signs that would help you identify where you are should you need to call 9-1-1.”

More information about calling 911 is available on MARC’s web site.

Send comments to kcpdchiefblog@kcpd.org.

911 call center makes a move

Today, our 911 Call Center is moving from their spot at 1111 Locust (next door to Police Headquarters) to a temporary location while the unit is remodeled and the citywide radio system is upgraded. We hope to reopen the new and improved Call Center in April 2011. Here's the full story from our Informant newsletter:

When dispatchers send officers out on a call, they must rely on 911 callers to know what’s happening at the scene. But soon, dispatchers will be able to access live video from cameras city-wide and provide first-hand accounts to responding officers.

“If we know there’s an incident where a camera is located, we should be able to pull up the video before the officers arrive,” Communications Manager Steve Hoskins said.

This new video technology is part of a $50 million project to replace the City’s radio system and completely remodel the police department’s 911 call center at 1111 Locust St. With these improvements, the department will be able to communicate directly with other law enforcement agencies, as well as provide more accurate information to officers who are responding to calls.

The communications unit will relocate to the backup call center at 1328 Agnes on Dec. 14 and construction on the call center at 1111 Locust is schedule to begin the following week.

The remodel includes a new video wall, where they can pull up live footage from cameras throughout the city, including SCOUT cameras, Green Light cameras, video cameras in the Power and Light district, and several others. The Communications Unit will also have access to multiple media sources during critical incidents or severe weather.

The remodel of the Communications Unit also includes tearing down a wall that currently divides 911 call takers from the police dispatchers. The center’s tiered flooring will be ripped out to put all the workstations on a single level. This will allow for the addition of two workstations and more efficient use of the space.

The workstations also will be replaced with versions that can be raised and lowered, allowing staff members to sit or stand as they take or make calls.

When you spend 8 to 12 hours tethered to your station by your headset, you need a break to be able to stand up and move around a little,” Hoskins said.

One other major change will be the replacement of the 15-year old radio system. The new version will be online in the spring and will greatly enhance regional interoperability. It will be interconnected with the radio systems of all cities in Johnson County, Kan., and Independence, Mo. The cities of Riverside, Gladstone, and North Kansas City are going to transition to the Kansas City radio system, rather than maintain their own radio systems.

Send comments to kcpdchiefblog@kcpd.org.

Thanking the behind-the-scenes life-savers

I often write about the heroics of our officers, but there’s another group of people who deserve recognition for daily saving lives in Kansas City: 911 calltakers and dispatchers. Without these dedicated individuals, police, firefighters and paramedics would never get to where they need to be to help people.

This is National Telecommunicator Appreciation Week, and our department is celebrating it today. It was by sheer coincidence, however, that today also was the day I heard a report from our Logistical Support Division commander on the performance of our calltakers and dispatchers. What I heard made me even more grateful for the work these men and women do.

First, our Communications Unit is down by 14 people, and due to budget restrictions, we have been unable to hire more. We are requiring all calltakers and dispatchers to work mandatory overtime. This is a strain on them and their families, and everyone in Kansas City should be grateful for their sacrifices. They have been short-staffed for more than a year and yet still did something amazing.

In 2007, 45.5 percent of all 911 callers in Kansas City got put on hold. Their average hold time was 48 seconds. And though the numbers of calltakers and dispatchers dwindled, by the end of 2009, just 23.2 percent of 911 callers were put on hold, and only for an average of 22.8 seconds. This reduction was achieved through a number of quality assurance measures.

Speaking of which, most people don’t know the quality assurance measures our department takes in terms of 911 calls. We have staff dedicated to listening to them to review the performance of calltakers and dispatchers. They dissect these calls to determine whether the calltakers and dispatchers are conforming to policy and meeting very high standards. I learned today that 14 members of our Communications Unit earned perfect scores throughout all of 2009. That is a remarkably hard thing to achieve, and I’m so proud of them.

So take some time today to thank the 911 calltakers and dispatchers who are the backbone of Kansas City’s public safety. Send a message to kcpdchiefblog@kcpd.org and I’ll be sure to pass it on to those dedicated men and women.