IR-01-24-13077
9 May 2024
Marc Duff
[FYI request #24043 email]
Tēnā koe Marc
Request for information
Thank you for your Official Information Act 1982 (OIA) request dated 17 April 2024. You
asked:
Please note this is a follow up to a request sent in September 2023.
Superintendent Lane Todd at a public meeting and was asked this information
and we were told he did not have the figures on him but we could make a request
such as this for the information.
Could you please advise the latest figures you have recorded please on response
times to 111 calls for Police in the Hornby area compared to other suburbs in
Christchurch. Would welcome seeing the figures for all suburbs/areas you record
this information against please in the Christchurch area.
Also how many call outs in your latest stats, say for example boy racer calls did
police not attend.
I apologise that you did not receive a response to the request you sent in September
2023. It appears to have been lost in the Police requests system and I have asked the
ICT department to investigate how this occurred.
When Police communication centres receive a request for service, an event is entered in
the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system. Events may come via many sources, not
just phone, and may include officer-discovered events. CAD cannot identify what number
the caller dialled to contact Police, only that an event was entered because of an
incoming request. Conversely, the phone system that tracks what line was dialled
(MiCCE) has no record of what the call was about, this information exists only in CAD.
Based on your questions, I have interpreted your request to be about response times to
events that were considered Priority 1 at acceptance and closure of the event, rather than
calls – by this I mean time taken for a police unit to arrive to a Priority 1 event, rather than
the time to answer a phone call to 111. Priority 1 events are often, but not exclusively,
entered in response to 111 calls. Not all 111 calls are categorised Priority 1.
Between 1 April 2023 and 31 March 2024, police attended 8,009 CAD events within the
Christchurch Metro scene area boundary1. This excludes those events that are police-
1
https://www.police.govt.nz/sites/default/files/about-
us/structure/districts/canterbury_800.jpg
Police National Headquarters
180 Molesworth Street. PO Box 3017, Wellington 6140, New Zealand.
Telephone: 04 474 9499. Fax: 04 498 7400. www.police.govt.nz
generated (such as traffic stops). Response time is the time between acceptance of the
event by the call taker and the first unit arrival. The table below shows the number of
attended CAD events and the median response time, by scene station.
Table 1. Attended CAD events within Canterbury Metro scene area, 1 April 2023 - 31 March 2024.
Scene Station
Attended P1 CAD Events Median Response Time
Christchurch
2,083
8 min 4 sec
Christchurch Airport
50
7 min 33 sec
Christchurch South
1,356
8 min 47 sec
Hornby
1,261
10 min 22 sec
Lyttelton
67
16 min 27 sec
New Brighton
1,099
8 min 55 sec
Papanui
1,973
8 min 46 sec
Sumner
120
13 min 11 sec
Overall Canterbury Metro Area 8,009
8 min 55 sec
In the same period and area, police did not attend 779 Priority 1 CAD events, five of
these were categorised as 'unauthorised street and drag racing'. Policing by its very
nature requires constant prioritisation of resources to respond to emergency demand.
Police will always prioritise and attend the jobs where peoples’ lives or safety are in
danger.
Data in this response is drawn from a dynamic operational database and is subject to
change as new information is recorded or updated.
Please note that as part of its commitment to openness and transparency, Police
proactively releases some information and documents that may be of interest to the
public. An anonymised version of this response may be publicly released on the New
Zealand Police website.
Ngā mihi
A/Superintendent Bronwyn Marshall
Director Emergency Communications Centres (Relieving)
