Photo by Ethan Wilkinson on Unsplash

Recent data suggest that it now takes significantly longer than in the past for emergency services to reach the scene of an incident, including police service. According to data, the police even take longer to answer emergency calls than other departments. 

The UK Home Office published a report on police response to 999 calls last year. Based on the report, only one force in the country — Avon and Somerset Police — met the national standard of answering 90 percent of emergency calls in under ten seconds.

Of 5.2 million emergency calls across the UK between November 2021 and April 2022, 29 percent of responses took longer than the national target. Late responses to 999 calls amounted to roughly three million in a year. 

The BBC reported that the response time to most serious emergency calls, also known as Grade 1 calls, in Greater Manchester nearly doubled in seven years. In 2011, it took an average of six and a half minutes to respond to Grade 1 calls. By 2018, it took police 12 and a half minutes to do so.

The BBC report also showed that in 2018, it took the police seven and a half hours to respond to Grade 2 calls, which typically require a response within an hour. It significantly increased from the 48-minute response period for such calls seven years earlier.

Then, the Met data also suggested that the response time to less urgent calls had increased significantly more than their priority counterparts. According to the Met, the time needed to answer the most urgent “immediate” calls has increased by 20 percent in a decade. Meanwhile, the response period for “significant” calls has risen by 240 percent within the same timeframe.

Crime rate shoots up

While it takes much longer for police to respond to emergencies, the Home Office noted that recorded crimes hit a historic high of 6.5 million incidents in the year leading up to June 2022. 

During that period, the percentage of crime cases solved by police declined to a record low of 5.4 percent. It was a big decline from the 15.5 percent rate of solved cases seven years prior. Across the UK, police only solved one in 25 theft cases last year. As for violent crimes against people, the police’s success rate was five percent. 

There have been more varied forms of criminal activities targeting UK people. DailyMail reported an incident of armed thieves raiding a DPD van in broad daylight in September. They took expensive items, such as clothing and electronics, in around a minute. These thieves focused on smaller packages that they could take away quickly.

Meanwhile, major retailers recently reported increasing shoplifting cases across the country. According to the British Retail Consortium, shoplifting crime has risen 27 percent in the UK’s ten biggest cities this year. Data showed that police failed to respond to 73 percent of serious calls from these retail establishments.

The less-desirable rate of police response time is a systemic problem that may take some time to solve. The recent development shows that homeowners and business leaders must proactively protect their properties from crime. 

Several security measures are taken to increase safety in residential and business properties, such as installing CCTV and an alarm system. Some people are employing security services like Marengo to increase the protection of their properties. 

It is necessary to note that the sector is continuously evolving, meaning that the forms of crime are constantly changing and developing. Property owners may need to adapt to those changes regularly.