Anyone who has ever had an emergency or a house fire knows what it feels like to wait for help. And wait, and wait, and wait.
Or so we thought.
A computer-assisted report Sunday by Herald reporters Scott North and Katherine Schiffner revealed that response times for Snohomish County sheriff’s deputies aren’t as far off as many might have thought. In fact, when lives are in danger, deputies are there fairly promptly — in about the same amount of time as their King County counterparts. Not bad for having to drive through other jurisdictions to reach some emergency calls. And so much for talk that poor police service makes some of our county’s unincorporated area more dangerous than others.
The Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office has done a good job establishing priorities and adhering to them. The sheriff’s chief of operations, Rick Cothern, was right when he told reporters, "It’s triage police work."
Got an armed robbery in progress? Five minutes is the average response time.
Burglary in progress? Eight minutes. In fact, about 40 percent of the most urgent calls are responded to within five minutes.
Of course, this doesn’t detract from Sheriff Rick Bart’s desire to boost his staff and he admits it takes far too long to answer other calls that don’t top the triage list, such as taking a burglary report — a whopping 53 minutes. Just because someone’s home has already been broken into doesn’t mean the homeowner doesn’t see it as an emergency or doesn’t feel in further danger. But a shooting takes priority. No argument there.
The huge difference in response times between high-priority emergencies and other calls is impossible not to notice. But as long as deputies are racing from one call to the next, residents of more remote parts of the county will have to get used to the wait — especially folks who come here from more urban areas where response times are quicker thanks to geography and a host of other factors.
No matter how many law officers this county hires, when someone is faced with an emergency five minutes might as well be five hours. This report shows us where things are working well and where we could make improvements. Realizing that we’re doing better than many may have thought is encouraging.
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