If you call 911, it may be a while before Wichita police show up. Here’s why.

She was bloodied and bruised, but Janet Solorzano felt lucky to escape after being punched and choked by an ex-partner at her apartment near Harry and Hillside in May 2021.

The 41-year-old sped off in her truck, then stopped in the parking lot of a closed dollar store.

She called 911 and waited, alone and scared.

Thirty-seven minutes passed. She called police again.

And waited.

After another 54 minutes, she called again. She asked for an ambulance, then decided to drive to the hospital. Police showed up there nearly two hours after her first 911 call.

“What about if I couldn’t escape?” she wondered.

When you call 911 seeking help from police in Wichita, it’s likely you will wait – possibly for a long time.

Police response times have more than doubled over 13 years – from an average of 10 minutes and 46 seconds in 2010 to 25 minutes and 13 seconds in 2022 for all calls, an Eagle analysis of response time data shows.

Response times for the highest priority calls also have grown, from just over six minutes in 2010 to 10 minutes and 41 seconds in 2022.

That’s despite having more officers and fewer calls than in the past.

Police – from rank-and-file officers to the chief – offer several reasons for the increase: not enough officers on the street, the transition to a new records system in 2021 and more complex community needs that require longer calls.

‘Response times clearly matter’

There’s no national or state standard for police response times. But they are important.

A 10% increase in response times led to a 4.7 percentage point decrease in the likelihood police would solve the crime, according to the 2018 study The Effect of Police Response Time on Crime Clearance Rates.

“Response times clearly matter,” said Tom Kirchmaier, a co-author of the study and director of policing and crime research at the London School of Economics.

On a broader scale, failing to catch criminals costs taxpayers, since they can continue to commit crimes as police trail behind. Slow response times also can erode public trust.

The Eagle’s analysis of response times and interviews with people who called 911 tell a discouraging, potentially dangerous story — that there’s no way of knowing when or if police will show up.

“I really feel like they failed that night,” Brandy Brown said. She called 911 on April 24, 2021, after seeing a girl she thought might be a victim of trafficking at a west Wichita hotel.

It took the police 42 minutes to arrive, including 13 minutes after the call was upgraded from a welfare check to a rape in progress after multiple people at her daughter’s birthday party also dialed 911.

Police wouldn’t tell Brown what they found out. She was relieved to learn from a reporter that it was a false alarm – a dad and daughter staying together. But she’s still bothered by how long it took police to get there.

New Police Chief Joseph Sullivan has vowed to change such experiences. He promised response times will improve and urged people to continue calling 911 when there is an emergency.

“The way I do this job, and when people talk to me about situations that they’ve had negative experiences with the 911 system, I always equate that as if they were a member of my own family and how I would feel,” he said.

“I take this job very personally. … The response time is poor right now and I’m going to make it my priority and my goal, one of many goals, for the coming year to improve that and to keep improving that in the succeeding years.”

Response times goals

The Wichita Police Department uses a hierarchy for 911 calls, with E the highest priority followed by 1, 2, 3 and 4. Police respond to the highest priority calls before going to lower ones.

Priorities can change as 911 emergency communications workers find out more details.

Solorzano’s case, for example, was a priority 3 call until it was upgraded to a priority 1 when she called the third time and asked for an ambulance. Police arrived at the hospital about two hours after her initial call and roughly 25 minutes after the call was upgraded.

Like many other departments, Wichita does not have set goals for response times. Some departments do, however.

The Houston Police Department tries to get to the highest emergency calls in fewer than 5.5 minutes. The San Diego Police Department has a goal of 7 minutes.

The Fort Worth Police Department tries to get to its top priority calls in 8 minutes and 54 seconds.

In 2010, Wichita police made it to priority E calls in 6 minutes and 3 seconds on average. By the end of 2022, that had increased nearly 77% to 10 minutes and 41 seconds.

Police response to a January 2022 priority E call of an armed robbery at a Dollar Tree at Pawnee and George Washington took even longer. Two men walked in with masks and a gun. They made off with $458 from the register before Wayneia Cole’s co-worker called 911.

Police arrived more than 14 minutes later. The robbers were never caught.

“14 minutes, that’s a long time,” the 22-year-old said.

That wait can strain trust that police will be there when it matters.

“I think they were just taking a long time because they always do when it’s our color race,” said 20-year-old Marquezja Dean, who had her foot run over during a domestic violence disturbance with a gun in north Wichita. It took police 22 minutes to respond.

“They don’t come right away,” she said. “I don’t even care about calling because I’d be waiting forever.”

Reasons for the response delay

Police offer a number of reasons for longer response times.

Former and current officers point to a troublesome, multi-million dollar records management system implemented in April 2021, the creation of specialty teams that take officers off the street. Current officers spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.

Sullivan, who took over the agency in late November after serving as a leader in the Philadelphia Police Department, listed a 60-plus officer shortage and more complex needs in the community that result in longer calls.

He acknowledged the longer response times stem from all of those issues.

“Undoubtedly Niche is contributing” to the problem, Sullivan said, referring to the NicheRMS365 records management system.

WPD public information officer Chad Ditch says there isn’t enough statistical evidence to say Niche is a cause.

But the data shows the 35 minute average response time in April 2021 was the worst from 2010 up until that month. Since then, the only months with worse response times have been August 2021 and June 2022.

Niche keeps officers tied up on calls longer because they have trouble finding the information they need and it takes more time to enter reports, officers say.

Niche the company did not comment on Wichita’s struggles with the system, citing a confidentiality clause in its contract with the city.

Brown’s 911 call about a girl being possibly trafficked and raped at a west Wichita hotel came just days after police started using Niche. It took 42 minutes for police to arrive.

Both Solorzano’s and Richard Jones’ 911 calls came on May 2, 2021 — a couple of weeks after Niche went into effect.

Jones, a retired Wichita middle school history teacher, called police after hearing gunshots in the middle of the night around his home near Edgemoor and Funston. Multiple people called police to report hearing gunshots in the neighborhood: one caller reported running and hiding in her bathroom and hearing a woman screaming; another caller said they heard a vehicle peel off.

It took police more than 90 minutes to arrive, even though it was a priority 1 call.

“Any time you call them it takes that long, it’s amazing,” Jones said. “It shouldn’t take that long. You call 911 because of an emergency. It just bugs me that it took that long.”

Jones has since moved from the neighborhood.

Stacie Sturgeon, a police employee who has helped with the transition to Niche, said a lot of the complaints The Eagle heard from officers about the system were issues with training.

“There’s a learning curve and I still think we are in that learning curve,” she said last month.

Sullivan agreed most of the problems with Niche have been issues with training. He added there have been more problems than you’d expect with a new system.

“The bottom line is it’s not user friendly … for people like myself,” he said. “So officers are finding it’s very manpower intensive in terms of data input.”

Victor Trillo decided to retire from the force around the time Niche was introduced, after 28 years on patrol. During his tenure, 911 calls were holding longer and longer, some for hours, he said.

“If you call 911, you are in dire need of help … there should be an officer on the way to go to you, but it’s not like that anymore,” he said. “Wichita has gotten away from helping the citizens of Wichita. They’ve gotten away from answering 911 calls.”

Adding police officers

More than any other factor, Sullivan said in December, filling the 60-plus budgeted police vacancies would reduce response times.

Kirchmaier’s 2018 study found that each additional officer hired generated a 170% cost benefit since it led to more arrests and prevented future crimes from being committed.

Police are also working to strengthen recruiting efforts and boost morale to keep officers from leaving, Sullivan said.

The number of Wichita police officers and 911 calls has ebbed and flowed over the years.

Call volume between 2010 and 2022 ranged from a high of nearly 258,000 in 2016 to a low of 239,316 in 2020. There were about 242,000 calls in 2022.

Staffing changes constantly. Overall police staffing ranged from a low of 790 in 2015 to a high of 857 in 2021, based on Jan. 1 numbers starting in 2012. The number of commissioned officers was at its highest in 2021 at 681 and second highest in 2022 with 671.

Specialty teams and reorganization are responsible for diverting some officers away from responding to 911 calls, officers have said.

Former Police Chief Gordon Ramsay, who resigned in March 2022 to move back to his native Minnesota, oversaw the creation of multiple specialty teams, including the Broadway corridor team, domestic violence team and the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network team.

The department also has the Homeless Outreach Team, which started before Ramsay.

The department originally denied a records request for the number of officers on those teams, but Sullivan provided the number: about 26 officers.

That number would be enough to affect response times, he said, adding that he would look at impact and the most critical community needs before making any changes.

Sullivan also attributed the growing response time to police being on calls longer, noting that officers have become the main responders on mental health calls as state and federal resources fail to keep up with the problem.

He cited one case where officers sat at a hospital for more than 12 hours with a teenager in the throes of a mental health crisis.

“There was no alternative. And certainly we don’t want our officers sitting with a child. But we were the only ones available, the only ones willing to do it,” he said, adding that he plans to explore available resources to help with those calls.

He also suggested finding an alternative way for people to report minor cases that don’t need an officer and increasing staffing at times data shows are likely to have more violent crime and more calls.

Those initiatives won’t happen overnight, which means people will continue to wait, at least for a while.

“It’s pretty concerning because they are supposed to try to get there quickly,” said Margaret Carrera, who called 911 twice and waited more than 6.5 hours for officers to respond to her north Wichita home after an alert on her surveillance system showed a couple stealing from her garage on June 20, 2021.

She called a second time more than five hours later, after she saw the suspects walk by her home.

“If he went in the garage … he could have went in the house. So that’s scary, that I’m there with my kids and he could have gone into the house,” she said, adding that she thinks the thieves would have been caught and her stolen weedeater and speaker, valued at $750, returned had police responded sooner.

Faster response leads to more arrests

Speed matters when it comes to responding to crimes.

The chances of police solving a crime drop by the minute, with a steep dropoff up until 40 minutes, when the chance of solving the crime is near 30%, Kirchmaier’s study showed. After 40 minutes, the chances of solving a crime continue to drop but at a much slower rate.

“If you’re not there in time, don’t bother showing up,” he said.

FBI data bears that out for Wichita. In general, police have solved a smaller percentage of crimes as response times have worsened, according to data from 2011 to 2020. The FBI says 2021 data should not be used in comparison because of a new records system.

In 2018, the worst year, police solved 31% of violent crimes, less than half of the 63% solved in the best year, 2013. The rate was 47% in 2020.

Police solved just 4% of property crimes in 2018, down from a high of 13% in 2015. The rate was just above 9% in 2020.

Meanwhile, Wichita’s violent crime has mainly trended up and property crime has gone up and down, according to Kansas Bureau of Investigation data spanning from 2010 to 2021. Property crime hit a 12-year low in 2021, but that data was submitted under the new records system.

“I have no reason to believe at this point” that the data is wrong, Sullivan said. “But becoming aware of the problems with Niche, I have ordered an audit of the department’s crime statistics to be sure.”

‘Still waiting, still waiting’

While Sullivan and the police department take steps to improve response times, those looking for help may continue to wait – like Teri Mott.

It took more than two hours for police to arrive at a downtown accident that Mott witnessed on her lunch break in October 2021. A car ran a red light and slammed into another vehicle at Hydraulic and Waterman before hitting a telephone pole and stopping on a sidewalk.

People were “shook up, but no one seemed injured,” she said. “We were initially alarmed (about) what was taking so long” for police to show up.

She called 911 and agreed to wait to tell police what happened.

She repeatedly texted her boss about the delays.

“I got back with her like every half hour and went, ‘I’m so sorry, still waiting, still waiting, still waiting,’” Mott said. “She was understanding … but we all (at the accident) agreed it was kind of excessive.”

EMS officials who passed the accident en route to another call stopped on their way back to make sure everyone was OK, she said.

In that instance, no one needed to be arrested and no one got away.

But that’s not always the case.

Solorzano was relying on police to bring in her abuser while she recovered in the hospital.

But he was not arrested, and Solorzano heard he fled to Mexico.

Family, she said, had called 911 about the abuse in the past, but she was always too scared to press charges. She thinks maybe that’s why police didn’t pay as much attention to the call.

In the past, she hadn’t wanted to do anything that could upset him. But on that day “he almost killed me and choke me and hit me … I decided to make a police report.”

Even now, more than 18 months later, thinking about that day makes her cry.

“The worst thing can happen in like seconds,” she said. “You’re supposed to have the help, and you don’t have the help … I never thought I was going to experience that, but I’m just trying to let it go.”

This story was originally published January 26, 2023 at 5:30 AM.