Kansas City Insider Clarifies 'Cherry-Picked' Police Response Time Stats

Over the past year our TKC blog community has LEAD KCMO CITYWIDE DISCUSSION of police response time for both elected officials and local media. 

Our blogging has pressed the issue and, recently, garnered claims of improvement. 

However . . . 

INSIDERS REVEAL STAT TACTICS & QUESTION KANSAS CITY POLICE PROGRESS!!!

Agree or disagree, the perspective deserves consideration. 

Here's the word . .  .  

Insider: I’m done staying quiet while leadership, executive staff, 99, and the BOPC manipulates numbers and hides the truth. 

Here’s the reality the public isn’t being told: The department’s monthly “response time” numbers only measure the interval from dispatch to officer arrival. They deliberately exclude the time from when the 911 call is received until dispatch happens.

Example: 911 call at 12:00 → dispatched at 12:05 → officer arrives at 12:10.

Public sees “5-minute response.”

Actual time the caller waited: 10 minutes.

This cherry-picked metric lets the department claim response times are “stable” even when we’re critically understaffed. With 20 officers available you get quick dispatch; with 1 officer available the queue can stretch for hours, yet the reported number barely moves because it starts at dispatch. That’s not transparency; that’s deception.

The overtime crisis is already hurting real response times, and it will get worse. Stop lying to the community about it.

Adding insult to injury, leadership approved a $20,000 raise for the Chief during the same budget “crisis” they keep complaining about. That’s not leadership; that’s hypocrisy.

If you want the truth, stop looking at the dispatch-to-arrival numbers and compare total call-to-arrival times (from 911 receipt to officer on scene) for the year before the 11-hour day schedule versus the year after. Sit down before you look—those numbers will be ugly, and heads should roll when people see them.

We need to quit hiding behind misleading statistics and start being honest with the public we serve.
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