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We often receive comments and concerns about the response time of our Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Deputies. The idea behind this post is to clear up some misconceptions and, hopefully, give you an idea of how important a good description is when you are speaking with our dispatch personnel.

First, we should familiarize ourselves with the different types of responses, which are emergent, priority and routine. With the most important being first and the least being last, a chart would go from emergent to priority and finally routine. For the average citizen, this means that a deputy on a routine call will leave it to respond to a priority or emergent call and, depending on the circumstances, may leave a priority call for an emergent call.

Emergent responses include confirmed threats to safety, active crimes or serious injuries. An emergent response is likely the type of response that everyone thinks of when they see police officers responding with lights and sirens. This will include exceeding the speed limit and driving against red lights in an effort to respond as quickly as possible. There are guidelines provided on how responses should be handled and can be researched at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department website.

Priority calls are a bit more confusing than its two counterparts. A priority call is one that has a high probability of threats to safety, active crimes or serious injury but cannot or has not been confirmed. A priority call can be upgraded to an emergent call depending on the information that continues to come in. On a priority call, deputies cannot use lights and sirens or any of the other tools allowed for emergent calls. All deputies in the area will respond as quickly as possible while obeying traffic laws.

Finally, we have routine calls. Routine calls are often referred to as report calls. These calls have no threat to safety, no active crimes and no serious injuries. The response time to these calls is typically handled by a single deputy who, depending on the information given, may or may not write a crime report.

A quick look at our current average response times will look as follows:

Emergent Response – 2 minutes and 54 seconds

Priority Response – 7 minutes and 30 seconds

Routine Response – 43 minutes and 12 seconds

Out of the five cities dispatched from Lakewood Sheriff Station, Bellflower is tied for second in lowest emergency response time, second for the lowest priority response time and last in routine response time. The proportionately high number of routine calls generated in Bellflower directly relates to the higher times in this city. Hopefully, this gives you a clearer picture of how your local law enforcement dispatching operation works.