ST. LOUIS—One Sunday this summer, Casey Crocker sat down to eat dinner with his wife in the backyard of their Benton Park home when they heard loud noises coming from their front porch.

Crocker poked his head around the front of the house and saw a stranger — clearly in the midst of a crisis — smashing Crocker's porch table, chairs and bench.

Crocker called 911. "This guy is right here," Crocker said he told the dispatcher.

It was 7:55 p.m.

When police didn't show up, Crocker kept calling. In one call, a dispatcher hung up on him. In another, he was told police were busy with more serious incidents and would be there soon. Finally, two officers arrived to take a report.

It was 9:25 p.m. The man was long gone.

"It was annoying and frustrating," Crocker said.

Crocker's case, police officials say, is a prime example of a problem they're trying to fix: Over the last decade, average St. Louis police response times to lower-priority 911 calls like Crocker's have more than doubled, from about 18 minutes to more than 40, according to a Post-Dispatch analysis.

In 2015, it took police about 12 minutes to arrive after someone dialed 911 for a "priority 2" call — such as a domestic incident, a fight, a call for help or a burglar in a building. Last year, the average response time more than doubled to 31 minutes.

"Priority 3" calls — burglaries, auto thefts, larcenies or motorists in need of an assist — rose from 20 minutes to 51.

There are many reasons, police officials say: The department has changed policies to require a two-car response to more incidents, to protect officers. With the proliferation of police body cameras, plus doorbell and other surveillance cameras, it takes police longer to gather evidence, write their reports and move on to their next call.

But the biggest factor, experts and police officials say, is record-low staffing at a department that has seen years of resignations and retirements, and not enough new hires to fill in.

"We're frustrated, too," police spokesman Mitch McCoy said. "The reality is we don't have the people we need at this moment to address those priority-two calls."

McCoy noted that response times to the city's most urgent emergencies — shootings, stabbings, serious car crashes and officers in need of aid — have remained relatively stable. The Post-Dispatch's analysis shows the average response time to those calls has risen from 5.9 minutes in 2015 to 6.7 in 2025.

Experts say that's not unusual. Across the country, high-profile police killings and corresponding protests put policing under scrutiny at a time when crime was rising, leading to officer resignations, early retirements and a struggle to find new recruits.

As a result, police departments — still understaffed — are forced to direct officers toward the most urgent calls, raising response times for lower-priority incidents.

"You do need more cops," said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based police think tank.

Megan Green, president of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen, isn't buying it.

Even with staff reductions, she said, the city's police department is still comparably staffed with other departments in major cities.

"What is happening that is causing these slow response times?" she said. "What are police actually spending their time doing?"

Perfect storm?

For roughly a decade beginning in the mid-2000s, response times for most calls remained relatively stable, according to the Post-Dispatch analysis.

But beginning in 2015, after protests and riots over the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, response times to lower-priority calls began to creep up.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought with it a spike in homicides not seen in St. Louis since 1970, adding stress to an already difficult job.

At the same time, a police officer killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, and thousands took to the streets across the U.S. to protest. Calls grew to defund the police.

It all led to a crisis in police staffing in departments across the country.

The loss of officers was particularly acute in St. Louis, where national trends were compounded by Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner, who failed to prosecute so many cases submitted by police that the backlog stretched into the thousands. At the same time, police said the mayor then, Tishaura O. Jones, and other city leaders weren't supporting them.

“The people in control of your budget are people who largely don’t like law enforcement,” one officer who left told the Post-Dispatch in 2023. “Who wants to go work in an environment when your local politicians are setting you up for failure and not providing you with the tools you need?”

Meanwhile, years of understaffing in the city's two 911 centers for fire and police had become a crisis.

In the first five months of 2021, 36% of 911 calls were put on hold for 10 seconds or more before a dispatcher answered, far surpassing national standards recommending 90% of calls get answered within 10 seconds. Five percent — some 6,000 callers — were on hold for at least two minutes.

The delays frustrated residents.

But police were also taking longer to respond after dispatchers picked up.

Response times

Police clock response times in two basic parts: The time it takes a dispatcher to send an officer. And the time it takes for the officer to arrive on scene.

The biggest driver in the increased response times is the first.

In 2021, it took nearly seven minutes on average for an officer to be dispatched to a priority-two call after a 911 call was answered.

By 2024, it took 18.

McCoy, the police department spokesman, said there are multiple explanations for that. Dispatchers can at times be overwhelmed. If several people are calling for the same incident, for instance, the dispatcher must wade through the information so they can give the correct details to police.

Other times — particularly on lower-priority incidents — there aren't any officers available to send, McCoy said.

Take Crocker's case in Benton Park. Seven minutes after Crocker's call, a police car was dispatched to his location. But a higher-priority call for a fight came in, and there wasn't another officer available, so the car was diverted.

It's a perfect example, McCoy said, of how staffing affects response times.

Between 2021 and 2025, the St. Louis Police Department lost nearly 300 sworn officers, bringing the department to 843, record-low staffing since 2007, according to data from the FBI.

Lee Ann Slocum, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said that definitely explains some of the increase.

"The number one thing that affects response times is staffing levels," she said.

Response times could have gone up far more. The steady loss of officers coincided with a drop in crime: In 2025, the city saw a roughly 16% drop in reported crime over the prior year, and a 42% reduction over 2022, department statistics show. The number of homicides reached a 12-year low.

That meant fewer 911 calls. In 2019, the St. Louis Police Department responded to roughly 514,000 calls for service. In 2025, it responded to around 335,000.

Departments across the country have experienced a similar fall in staffing and rise in response times.

Between 2020 and 2024, total police staffing across the country declined by 5.5%, according to surveys collected by the Police Executive Research Forum. Large agencies with more than 250 officers — like St. Louis — made up most of that decline, losing more than 6% of staff between 2020 and 2024.

An analysis from New Orleans-based crime data analyst Jeff Asher shows the effects on average response times:

In 2019, Nashville officers took about 38 minutes to respond to a call. By 2022, they took nearly 63 minutes. In New Orleans, response times went from roughly 51 minutes in 2019 to more than 146 in 2022. In New York, 18 minutes in 2019 turned into 43 by 2024.

Response times in many U.S. cities have since improved some, including in St. Louis, where lower-priority responses have decreased from 49 minutes in 2023 to 41.5 minutes in 2025, the Post-Dispatch analysis shows.

McCoy, the St. Louis police spokesman, said the department is trying. It held a hiring blitz, and just gave raises to officers. It's in the early stages of launching an advertising campaign to recruit from other police departments. And it's figuring out ways to better use its resources.

Last year, for example, the department deferred more than 11,300 911 calls to desk officers who take reports over the phone, freeing up street cops to handle more serious calls, according to department statistics.

But Green, the aldermanic president, wants more from the department: Is it working to reduce violence in other ways? Can it use its people more effectively? Are there enough street cops?

"Maybe rather than trying to add more officers, which is something that quite frankly every department is struggling with, we need to restructure so there are more boots on the ground," she said.

Residents left waiting

Amber Cole, who has lived in North City's O'Fallon Park neighborhood for nearly 30 years, said she calls 911 probably 50 times a year. She reports shots fired, illegal businesses, people in vacant buildings and kids gathering in the park to shoot off fireworks.

"I'm not one of these bystanders that sit back and wait for other people to call," she said. "I call."

It takes longer for cops to arrive than it used to, she said.

She knows her police district is one of the city's biggest by geographic area. She also acknowledges that the area deals with a lot of problems.

But she remembers a time when she knew the person who arrived. Now, she says she sees a lot of new police trainees. She builds relationships with the commanders, she said, but then they get transferred somewhere else.

"They don't know their community," she said.

That's frustrating to police, too, said Martin Garcia, president of the St. Louis Police Officers Association.

Fewer cops mean more officers running from call to call without breaks, he said, leaving less time to conduct interviews and make connections with the residents on the beat.

"They want to handle the call properly, and they want to do the best by the person calling 911," he said.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Marine Villa neighborhood president Sarah Ulrich said she called 911 because she saw someone set fire to a tree in a community garden. Nobody showed up, she said.

"It gives me anxiety, honestly," she said. "When you come upon a situation, you never know if anybody is going to be there to help deal with it or if you have to do it yourself."

Then, a few weeks ago, Ulrich saw a woman wearing no shoes in apparent mental distress walking near her house. Ulrich debated for hours whether to call the police.

Finally, about eight hours after she first spotted the woman, Ulrich saw a man with a gun trying to lure the woman into a nearby house. She dialed 911.

Police arrived a short time later, Ulrich said.

But the hesitancy she initially felt in calling for help was telling, she said.

"It makes you think," she said, "should I call? Is the situation important enough?"

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