Mona Hedges was tired of waiting.
Forty-five minutes after her husband, Don, reported a burglary at their Snohomish-area home, no deputies had shown up to investigate. The couple stood in their driveway that March evening, fearful that someone was still inside the house.
“I was really angry at that point,” she said. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to stand out here all night.’”
Armed with a baseball bat, the Hedgeses decided to search the house. The burglars were gone, but not before they had smashed in the back door and stolen two guns, cameras and binoculars.
The couple figured Don Hedges scared them off when he arrived home from work. They called the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office again.
And waited. At 10:45 p.m., they finally gave up and went to bed. About 10 minutes later, a deputy pulled into their driveway, a full 5 1/2 hours after they had first called 911.
The couple, whose home sits on an acre of land not far from Highway 522 between Monroe and Woodinville, said they were frustrated that a deputy didn’t get to their house sooner.
But they also understood why.
“There were so many calls that involved violence that we kept getting bumped to the end of the list,” Mona Hedges said. “I know it took them a long time to get to our burglary, but that has to be underneath someone having a drug bust and someone who just got shot.”
Fighting crime in Snohomish County’s unincorporated areas is all about priorities, and the most serious, life-threatening police incidents are getting the greatest attention, according to 2 1\2 years of sheriff’s office activity data.
While residents in unincorporated areas often find themselves in situations similar to that of the Hedgeses, waiting hours for a deputy to investigate a “cold” burglary or other property crime, data also show they receive prompt police service when lives are at stake.
Deputies here reach people in serious trouble in about the same time it takes their counterparts in neighboring King County, the analysis found.
Countywide, data show Snohomish County deputies on average reach the scene of armed robberies within five minutes. When there is a report of a burglary in progress, deputies on average are surrounding the home in about eight minutes.
The analysis found that 40 percent of the highest-priority emergency calls to the sheriff’s office during the first half of this year were answered within five minutes. Deputies were on the scene within 10 minutes 70 percent of the time.
The data on police response run counter to often strident claims that Snohomish County’s unincorporated areas are unusually dangerous because of poor police service.
Calls to hire more deputies are a perennial feature of the county’s budget debate. Questions about the adequacy of police response also have landed the county in a multimillion-dollar federal lawsuit brought by family members who allege their civil rights were violated when a mentally ill man forced his way into their Seattle Hill-area home in 1999. Key rulings in the case are being decided this summer.
With 247 deputies patrolling roughly 2,000 square miles – an area larger than Rhode Island – the department has had no choice but to array its resources in a way that places public safety at a greater premium than public service, sheriff’s officials say.
“It’s triage police work,” said Rick Cothern, chief of operations for the sheriff’s office.
Sheriff Rick Bart is proud of his deputies’ performance on emergency calls, but is convinced that the community’s needs still aren’t being adequately met. Response to emergency calls could still be better, he said, adding that there are “unacceptable” delays in answering lower-priority calls.
For example, during the past 2 1\2 years, the average wait for a deputy to take a burglary report was 53 minutes.
The Herald used computers to examine more than half a million 911 calls to the sheriff’s office between January 2001 and June 30, 2003.
Domestic violence, by far the most frequent type of serious emergency call in the county, saw an average 11-minute response, although the figure was substantially lower in the more urban neighborhoods in the county’s unincorporated south end.
Not surprisingly, some of the slowest response times in Snohomish County were in outlying areas where access is limited. The same pattern is present in unincorporated King County.
Sheriff’s deputies in King County respond to nearly all life-threatening emergencies, such as an armed robbery, within five minutes, said Jim Hilmar, who does crime analysis for the King County Sheriff’s Office. Calls that King County classifies “priority one,” such as traffic accidents and domestic violence, have an average response time of nine minutes, he said.
It can take longer for deputies to reach rural areas of unincorporated King County, Hilmar said. For homes in northeast King County near Woodinville, it takes deputies an average of 10 1\2 minutes to respond to priority one calls. By comparison, those calls take an average of six minutes to answer in urban Shoreline.
“The real rural areas shouldn’t expect urban response times, and I don’t think most people (who live there) do,” he said.
That apparently isn’t always the case for Snohomish County residents.
Many new arrivals here come from more urban areas and bring with them urban expectations of police service, Undersheriff Steve O’Connor said.
The response to emergency calls is in line with what other similar departments provide, but the sheriff’s office hasn’t made a point of emphasizing that out of embarrassment over the delays in handling less serious incidents, Cothern said.
Bart said the department’s own analysis of data is consistent with what The Herald found. The county needs more deputies so it can step up efforts in investigating crimes and lock up the criminals responsible before they can cause more mayhem, Bart said.
“Response time is just one piece of the puzzle. We know that, and the data confirms it,” he added.
How many additional deputies Snohomish County needs, and how to pay for them, has been a debate that heats up each year as the county prepares its general fund budget. County leaders this year are talking about ways to add a “strike team” of deputies to target methamphetamine dealers, even as they are talking about budget cuts across the board.
Since 1996, the county has added 72 deputies. County expenditures on law and order have nearly tripled over the last 12 years. Criminal justice spending now consumes nearly 70 percent of the county’s general fund. For 2003, that is expected to reach $113.5 million of the $165.2 million total.
The union representing sheriff’s deputies has been among the most vocal advocates for a larger law enforcement presence in Snohomish County’s unincorporated areas.
Deputies added in recent years have improved safety, but on many nights there is little time to do anything except race from one high-priority call to the next, said Sgt. Ty Trenary, president of the Snohomish County Deputy Sheriff’s Association.
The data back Trenary up, particularly in the county’s more urban south end, where deputies so far this year have responded to nearly 60 percent of all the unincorporated area’s most serious emergency calls. Analysis shows the majority of those calls are clustered between 4 p.m. and 3 a.m., a situation that concentrates their impact, Trenary said.
The union president said he believes still more deputies are needed for patrol, but he’s also heard from residents, who have made it clear they want more follow-up on crime investigations.
The sheriff’s office has in recent years based its staffing requests in part on a computer program that calculates average response times to different types of calls in different areas of the county. The program also factors in time for other aspects of the deputies’ jobs, including writing reports and time for focusing on known neighborhood problems.
The computer model has recommended that the county hire dozens more deputies, but county leaders say there simply isn’t enough money, particularly with so much already going to pay for arresting, prosecuting and locking up offenders.
Regardless of how the sheriff’s office determines its staffing needs, “ultimately, it may turn out that the public’s willingness to pay” that determines the level of police service provided, O’Connor said.
Police response times also are influenced by distances and traffic conditions, O’Connor said. As the county grows, increasingly congested roads are likely to reduce police response times, he said.
Scott North and Katherine Schiffner are reporters for The Herald in Everett.
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