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Publication Number: 1558
FOI Number: 20443
Information Request - which has been numbered to assist in this disclosure:
1. Your force's incident response targets in minutes for each grade of 999 call and what potential crimes each grade includes, where incident response is the attendance of police officers following a 999 call.
2. Your force's annual average incident response times in minutes for each grade of call from 2019-2024
3. For each grade of call, your force's fastest and slowest incident response times by year from 2019-2024.
FOI Duty
First Duty – Essex Police holds some of the information relating to your request
Second Duty – See below
Fact - It is not possible to extract and verify all the data in your request
Exemption - Section 12(1)
Refusal - Section 17(5) of FOIA
Reasoning – Essex Police are unable to provide a comprehensive data report to meet this request as the data is not available in a readily extractable format, nor is it held on a central log.
There are anomalies in the call handling data that require manual review of all of the slowest response incidents to find the true longest response time. An explanatory note is set out below.
To establish if information is held would, therefore, exceed the time and cost limits under the FOIA and would qualify as the creation of data as the results cannot be processed by means of purely sorting or filtering data sources or running a database query tool. There is no requirement under the act to create data purely to answer FOI requests.
Duty to assist – When refusing a request on cost (Section 12(1)/12(2)), outside of the act and in effort to assist we can provide the following
Essex Police can report as follows:
Caveat: The data is correct as at 05/07/2024
Explanatory Note:
Essex Police can confirm that there will be some calls that will show a very long response time, as this is measured by using the saved time vs the time a patrol is shown at scene on STORM. There are often circumstances where a patrol has not been shown on scene or the call has been downgraded and an officer has attended days later.
1. Your force's incident response targets in minutes for each grade of 999 call and what potential crimes each grade includes, where incident response is the attendance of police officers following a 999 call.
Essex Police Response Policy – Performance commitments
Grade 1 – Urban Emergency – 15mins
Grade 2 – Rural Emergency – 20mins
Grade 3 – Priority Response – Attendance as soon as possible and within 60mins
Grade 4 – Routine Response – Attendance as soon as possible and within 48hrs
Grade 5 – Resolution Without Response – This grade is in relation to a deployment created on STORM that came in via a 999 call but needs no attendance and can be managed in its entirety by the Assessment and Investigation Centre. The non-urgent crime reported to Essex Police can be allocated to an officer to investigate
Grade 6 – Appointment – Where an incident does not require an emergency or priority response, but attendance is required, and any such attendance is NOT time critical a mutually agreed time and date will be arranged between the caller and the Essex Police Call Handler. This will be agreed at the time of the initial call. All appointments will be booked through the Essex Police appointment system.
Potential Crimes: An immediate graded call is anything where there is immediate danger to life or property or if an offender/suspect is still at the location or if there is an immediate threat. E.g. Crime in progress or assault in progress.
2. Your force's annual average incident response times in minutes for each grade of call from 2019-2024
Context: There are many occasions where the caller may not at first disclose their whereabouts and when Officers finally find the caller, the individual chooses to close the incident down requesting no further action to be taken forward by Essex Police. Additional examples of long response times can result from the common occurrence of 3rd party reports of a disturbance at an address where the suspects had left the scene. It may take a number of days to find the occupant of the address, despite lengthy intelligence and telephone enquiries.
2019 |
|||
Priority Description |
Number of Incidents Recorded |
Number of Incidents Attended |
Average Response time in minutes |
1. Urban Emergency |
47959 |
47567 |
15 |
2. Rural Emergency |
22399 |
21661 |
20 |
3. Priority |
79115 |
61239 |
259 |
Total all grades |
245988 |
175749 |
522 |
Total incidents |
422423 |
185137 |
N/A |
2020 |
|||
Priority Description |
Number of Incidents Recorded |
Number of Incidents Attended |
Average Response time in minutes |
1. Urban Emergency |
50930 |
50768 |
13 |
2. Rural Emergency |
23846 |
23511 |
17 |
3. Priority |
78520 |
62002 |
274 |
Total all grades |
251600 |
184270 |
459 |
Total incidents |
410571 |
194280 |
N/A |
2021 |
|||
Priority Description |
Number of Incidents Recorded |
Number of Incidents Attended |
Average Response time in minutes |
1. Urban Emergency |
55195 |
55146 |
13 |
2. Rural Emergency |
25774 |
25684 |
19 |
3. Priority |
73675 |
60806 |
286 |
Total all grades |
252601 |
189910 |
514 |
Total incidents |
431115 |
200520 |
N/A |
2022 |
|||
Priority Description |
Number of Incidents Recorded |
Number of Incidents Attended |
Average Response time in minutes |
1. Urban Emergency |
55894 |
55811 |
15 |
2. Rural Emergency |
26663 |
26477 |
19 |
3. Priority |
65550 |
51243 |
369 |
Total all grades |
229122 |
173479 |
666 |
Total incidents |
419388 |
185090 |
N/A |
2023 |
|||
Priority Description |
Number of Incidents Recorded |
Number of Incidents Attended |
Average Response time in minutes |
1. Urban Emergency |
55316 |
55077 |
18 |
2. Rural Emergency |
26689 |
26300 |
22 |
3. Priority |
60792 |
48940 |
386 |
Total all grades |
199265 |
165282 |
639 |
Total incidents |
413667 |
181078 |
N/A |
3. For each grade of call, your force's fastest and slowest incident response times by year from 2019-2024.
Data is for calendar year January 1st to December 31st for 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023; and January 1st to May 31st for 2024*.
Data is based on Storm incidents where the priority code was 1 (Urban Emergency) and 2 (Rural Emergency) - combined together as both are classed as emergency, and where the Response Time in Minutes (Saved) which is: number of minutes from incident created (saved) to 1st resource arrived at the scene, is not blank.
The below table represents average of response time in minutes – as per the request of “time taken for police to attend following a call”. Displayed by Final Call Type and year.
Final Call Type / Year |
2021 |
2022 |
2023 |
2024* |
Grand Total |
Grand Total |
14.6 |
16.1 |
18.9 |
16.4 |
16.2 |
In addition the latest available data on the longest response times in minutes is set out below – please note the above context regarding the possible reasons for long response times which should also be applied to this data:
2021 |
Response Time in Minutes |
2022 |
Response Time in Minutes |
2023 |
Response Time in Minutes |
||
1. Urban Emergency |
22266 |
1. Urban Emergency |
29876 |
1. Urban Emergency |
19320 |
||
2. Rural Emergency |
17680 |
2. Rural Emergency |
5885 |
2. Rural Emergency |
17307 |
||
3. Priority |
102325 |
3. Priority |
165392 |
3. Priority |
56173 |
Every effort is made to ensure that the data provided by Essex Police is accurate and complete. However, Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the purposes of providing data to answer specific FOI enquiries. Please note although data can be extracted from a number of sources via database queries, the results may be subject to inaccuracies. Care should be taken to understand our return when considering the interpretation or further use of the data.
The following article available via our publication scheme may also be of interest:
Resolution Centre and Force Control Room Calls 2016-2020 | Essex Police