Five years after lawsuit settlement, Chicago’s 911 system is still missing crucial data
Chicagoans have made more than a million calls for service so far this year. For 3 in 10 of the calls, there’s no information on when police arrived to help.
Illustration by Russell Lord.
By Aydali Campa
For years, some Chicago residents have sounded the alarm over how long police officers take to arrive after they’ve called 911 for help — if they show up at all.
The city faced a lawsuit over the issue, which lagged in court for years. In 2021, as part of a settlement agreement, the City of Chicago pledged to better track when police respond to 911 calls. The city’s promises included improving its data collection showing when officers arrive at the scene.
But five years later, there is still a data gap that poses a barrier to seeing how long it takes police to respond to different communities.
So far this year, the city is still missing data on when police officers arrive on scene in three of every 10 of its 911 calls, according to publicly available calls-for-service data.
Jamie Groth Searle said it took police more than half an hour both times she dialed 911 from her home in Archer Heights over the last decade. One time was for an assault, and the other was after she was robbed in public. Both instances made her more cautious about where she goes, and many of her neighbors agree, she said.
"You just know after a certain hour not to be out," said Groth Searle, who founded the community organization Southwest Collective. "You don't want to risk it because you don't know if anybody's going to come."
Of the more than 73,000 calls made from residents in the police department's 8th District this year, which includes Groth Searle’s neighborhood, just six out of every 10 calls have a police response time logged. It is one of the districts with the most incomplete data in the city alongside the 18th District, which includes the Near North Side.
Community members and advocates say having complete data showing when police respond to calls is critical to addressing inequities in how the department serves each of its 22 police districts. Chicago has the second largest police department in the country and serves one of the most racially segregated cities in the U.S.
The Chicago Police Department did not respond to the Investigative Project on Race and Equity’s questions about its delayed response times, including residents' concerns.
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In early October, the Mayor’s Office told the Investigative Project it would launch a new system in November that “will improve response times and will increase transparency.”
"The City remains committed to fulfilling its obligations under the settlement agreement and is taking concrete steps to achieve full compliance," a spokesperson with the city’s Office of Public Safety Administration told the Investigative Project. The agency manages the city’s police response time data.
A history of long response times
The average police response time for 911 calls in Chicago is about 11 minutes for all calls and just over nine minutes for high-priority ones. Calls that are considered the highest priority level might involve serious injuries or violent crimes, according to the Office of Inspector General’s review of CPD’s response time data.
Chicago’s average response time lags behind other major cities like Los Angeles, Houston and Phoenix, where police take five to eight minutes to arrive on the scene for calls labeled as high priority.
The available call for service data so far this year shows that response times to 911 calls in Chicago vary widely from neighborhood to neighborhood.
In the 4th District, which includes the neighborhoods of Hegewisch and South Deering on the Southeast Side, callers wait on average about 15 minutes for police to arrive. That is double the amount of time callers wait for police in the 7th District, which includes South Side neighborhoods like Englewood and West Englewood.
Downtown, residents in the 1st District have waited on average more than 11 minutes this year for police to respond to high priority calls.
Long response times is an issue residents have raised for years.
In 2011, the Central Austin Neighborhood Association, a community organization on the city’s West Side, and the ACLU of Illinois sued the city for discrimination over how officers were deployed to respond to 911 calls.
The case lasted a decade before the parties reached settlement in 2021. Although the city did not admit any legal wrongdoing for the disparities in response times, it committed to use its “best efforts” to obtain complete data for police response times for 80% of the calls within three years, lawsuit records show.
But the city is still behind its goal.
From January through September this year, people in Chicago made more than 1 million 911 calls. Of these calls, city data shows that less than 70% of them have a recorded arrival time for police officers.
“It's imperative for creating trust between the police and the people they serve that if you are in Lakeview or if you are in Austin, you should be able to call the police and know that if you're having an emergency, they will come promptly,” said Alexandra Block, director of the criminal legal system and policing project at the ACLU of Illinois.
“The only way we can determine that the police are policing fairly and equitably is to have this complete data,” Block said.
The city’s Inspector General published a report in 2023 finding that only about half the calls made in the four years of data investigators reviewed had timestamps for when police arrived on scene.
In its response to the findings, the police department and Office of Emergency Management and Communications said it would implement a new computer-aided dispatch system, often referred to as CAD, to fix the issue but delays continued.
A CAD is a software system used across departments including CPD to manage 911 calls and communicate during the dispatching of a responding city department. The OEMC receives all 911 calls, creates an event in the system, categorizes its priority level and event type, and then sends it to a dispatcher before it is assigned to a police unit.
The system the city used for over 30 years requires officers to manually input their response status, and it can only be updated once the previous status has been updated.
This summer, the Inspector General’s Office released a follow up report finding that although the city made improvements, officers were still not consistently recording the status of their response to an incident.
A new emergency call system on the way
In 2020, the city announced a $74.9 million deal with the software company CentralSquare Technologies to roll out a new CAD system. The city expects that the new system will result in more complete response time data and improve emergency response times.
City officials said the new CAD system will automatically log officers’ arrival time, which “will eliminate the need for officers to manually enter their arrival information, supporting more accurate and timely documentation,” according to the Mayor’s Office.
"The new system will streamline dispatch operations by providing a common platform that allows departments the ability to share information in real time," said Griffin Krueger, deputy press secretary for the Mayor’s Office.
The city said the new system should’ve been implemented by 2023, but was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Krueger says the system should be fully integrated by this November, but didn’t share a specific date. He said the city tested the new and the current CAD systems against each other, and found that 15 scenarios tested with the new system resulted in an average 35% faster police response time.
Some residents say they hope to see improvements soon so they feel safer in their neighborhoods.
In the Northwest Side neighborhood of Montclare, Teresa Charo says she keeps the door of her hair salon locked to everyone except her clients.
Charo said she called 911 when she saw an unhoused person upset and throwing objects near her salon. She said a 911 call dispatcher told her police would arrive shortly but they never did.
Charo said this isn't the first time she’s seen or heard a disturbance happening on her salon’s block, but she rarely sees police patrolling the street.
The police district that Montclare is a part of, data shows, is missing police arrival time for about a dozen 911 calls made this year.
“If you call for an emergency, they should come as soon as possible,” Charo said in Spanish. “If they don’t come, they won’t help us.”
Aydali Campa is an investigative reporter with the Investigative Project on Race and Equity. Reach her at aydali@raceandequityproject.org.