“That’s what you have to explain to people,” said Tate, who represents District 1 in the northwest part of the city, and is a former police deputy chief and once served as department spokesperson.

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To significantly improve, the city needs more officers on the street, Tate said. The city is aggressively hiring police, hiring 665 officers since 2015, according to city records. But the hires haven’t kept pace with attrition, as officers retire and younger ones leave for other departments. Pay is low – starting pay is $36,000 – for a job in a city the FBI last week declared the most dangerous in America (the city disputes with the designation).

The Detroit police added 55 officers in July to give it 1,700 officers. That’s still more than 120 short of the city’s budgeted allotment. And it’s far fewer than the 2,500 it had five years ago, according to FBI statistics.

James White, assistant police chief for support operations, said the department continues to improve its procedures and adding officers isn’t the only solution. Tate and Bell, a retired police officer, disagree.

“We are still under strength,” Bell said.

High response times attacked

Outrageous response times were one of the symptoms of a failed city that Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr used to persuade a judge to declare the city bankrupt. Orr claimed the response time peaked at 58 minutes.

Orr hired former Cincinnati Police Chief James Craig, a Detroit native, to take over as police chief in May 2013. Craig oversaw sweeping changes, not the least of which was reducing the number of calls that would get a Priority 1 response. The the impact was immediate: Priority 1 call volume fell from about 2,500 to 1,300 a week in the months after the classification change – and response times likewise fell. By July of 2015, response times averaged 16 minutes, according to the department.

The department also changed how it took calls, asking questions in a more structured, deliberate way, and improved how it monitored its rolling fleet of cars. Prior to the change dispatchers did not know where cars were, even though GPS technology existed in every car.

“When you weren’t responding to a call, you could be anywhere,” Martin said.

The department, White said, wasn’t using GPS, and dispatchers had to use radios to ask if cars were available. That added precious minutes to response times.

Now, White can sit in his office at police headquarters and watch – as all dispatchers can – the location of every department car, like a giant Uber app on a big-screen TV. There are red, yellow and blue cars and everyone knows which car is closest to an emergency.

Should a car stay red – out of service – too long, White may pick up his radio and ask why.

The department made other changes that affected personnel. It moved officers away from downtown and out into the precincts and the number of officers assigned to different shifts is determined based on historic crime patterns, putting more officers on the road when – and where -- crime is most prevalent, White said.

“We’re just a little bit smarter in how we police,” White said.

Bell said Detroiters are “very patient,” and when it comes to response time in the past, they had to be. Now, there are more complaints about cars speeding down neighborhood streets than a lack of police cars on those streets, Tate said.

But, in a city still reeling from crime rates unseen in almost any other American city, residents can still fume when their call for helps takes too much time.

“People are not down on the police, they’re not angry at the police,” Tate said. “But it’s still an issue for residents.”