[From article]
New Orleans businessman Trey Monaghan, writing in an opinion piece last month, shared with agonizing detail how he chased a suspected burglar outside his newly opened restaurant on St. Claude Avenue, only to have to wait more than an hour for a police officer to show up.
"I started to realize that the police were not coming when the dispatcher told me she had to go," Monaghan wrote. "After a half hour, I decided I had to get back to fixing the problem the robber had created."
A call to New Orleans police, many residents have learned, likely comes with a wait – a long wait in most cases.
Residents who called NOPD through September of this year had to wait an average 73 minutes for police to dispatch an officer their way. That's nearly four times as long as it took in 2011, when the average dispatch time was 15 minutes, according to an analysis of NOPD calls for service by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune and WVUE Fox 8 News.
[. . .]
"If people don't feel the police department is going to be there, they'll stop calling," said Nahanni Pollard, a criminologist and faculty member at Douglas College in British Columbia. "It has the potential to allow crime to start. If you think police are not going to come, or they won't be there in three or four hours, that police deterrent will be eroded."
[. . .]
He said longer response times have been an "unintended consequence," of the department's federal consent decree. The mandates aim to improve policing and halt what the Justice Department said were systematic violations by NOPD. The mandate requires NOPD officers to spend more time on an individual call, he and other police officers said, leading, in part, to longer waits for citizens.
Dispatchers cannot send new items to an officer who has not cleared his or her previous call. In time-consuming incidents, such as domestic disturbances, traffic accidents, burglar alarm checks or mentally ill subjects acting out violently, proper NOPD procedure now requires that officers have backup, record video from their body-worn cameras and complete detailed investigation checklists before leaving some scenes.
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2015/10/new_orleans_police_response_ti.html#incart_2box
New Orleanians on average wait over 1 hour for police to arrive
By NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
on October 26, 2015 at 10:00 PM, updated October 26, 2015 at 10:22 PM
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