Police response time and citizen reporting of serious crime

McClintock

According to the statistics presented in the article Calling the Police, Citizen Reporting of Serious Crime (Speilman & Brown 1984) rapid response regarding crime issues only leads to arrest about 3% of the time. Even with increasing programs to enhance this average it is believed that it may only improve by another 3 or 4%. As a rule, most of the time these crimes are discovery crimes, crimes reported after the fact. In this scenario the crime has been perpetrated long before a call is made, perhaps even hours. This allows the perpetrator plenty of time to escape, resulting in such low arrest rates. Which is why discovery crimes should not necessitate a rapid response call. Only if the call is made while the criminal is in the act of committing a crime, which is called an involvement crime, can any reasonable hope of securing an arrest be possible. However, even with involvement crimes, a delay in the citizen or police response by even a few minutes drastically reduces the possibility of apprehension.

Another cause of this low arrest rate is citizen delay. This can occur for several reasons. Firstly, a caller is often faced primarily with deciding on whether or not a crime is actually being committed and resolving any ambiguity regarding this can certainly delay response. Seeking additional advice or information from a third party prior to calling in order to bolster the belief that a crime is occurring is another factor. Others involve actual physical injury resultant from the crime or even an attempt at apprehending the criminals themselves will obviously cause a delay. By Police offering a citizen's action forum, and/or a community based anti-crime program, many of these issues could be resolved so that response time is faster.