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RESPONDING TO CALLS AND CORRESPONDENCE

Annual Review
For the year ending 31.3.97

Back to Service Standards

We set ourselves high standards for responding to telephone calls and getting our police officers to an incident. We also recognise that any letters we receive need a satisfactory reply.

Only three other police forces set a higher target for answering 999 calls. Our aim is to answer all emergency calls within 10 seconds. During the review year we managed this 90.9% of the time, higher than our target of 90% and an improvement on the previous year.

When there's an emergency, our target for getting to you is 12 minutes if you're in a town and 16 minutes if you're in a rural area. During the review period we achieved this 85.8% of the time, a slight improvement on the previous year but still short of our target of 90%.

For more information about how we decide which calls need an immediate or routine response, see standard 4.1 in the Service Delivery Standards folder at your local Essex Police station or library. This also contains a fuller version of this review.

 

The new Force Information Room at Police Headquarters went live in 1997, bringing control of all Essex Police radio communications into the same room where all 999 calls are answered

Where a "routine" response was needed - where the incident wasn't an emergency - we beat our four-hour target of getting an officer to the caller 95% of the time. Again this figure - 98.1% of the time - was an improvement on the previous year.

On 1st August 1997, a new "high" level of response was introduced for calls from the public. This bridges the gap between an immediate and a routine response, and means an officer must get to you as soon as possible, within 45 minutes. This new grade is not covered by this review.

 

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