New Orleans Public Safety Analyst Jeff Asher told the City Council yesterday that NOPD staffing has fallen to historic lows.
NOPD staffing sits at 1,011 commissioned officers and 30 recruits according to Asher.
“NOPD’s commission strength is down to the lowest number that we have recorded, we have data back to I think 1930 on their commission strength and we have monthly, or quarterly data back to 2006,” said Asher. “It’s never been lower.”
The department has shrunk by 11% according to Asher since December of 2020.
Response times are also hitting seven year highs. While they were a touch higher to start the year, NOPD is still recording average response times for all calls of service of 128 minutes. Asher said non-emergency calls have an average response time of 163 minutes, emergency incidents have responses of 28 minutes. Burglary calls are “well over 200” minutes.
Asher said while there is no national data on response times, a survey of other cities shows New Orleans is “considerably the worst of the ones I have looked at”.
“When we are talking about Jefferson Parish we’re talking about a four minute response time on average for an emergency call, 11 minutes maybe for a non-emergency call,” said Asher. “If you did not have bad response times, you’d expect somewhere in that range.”
