The Dallas Police Department is actively working to improve their response times. Here’s how long it typically takes for police to arrive.
When Dallas Police Chief Daniel Comeaux stepped into his role last year, he knew the department needed to improve its response times across the board. During a city council meeting on Wednesday, Dallas Assistant Chief Richard Foy reported that they were well on their way toward achieving that goal, but both he and Chief Comeaux acknowledged there was still room for improvement.
For 2026, so far, police response times are as follows:
- Priority 1 (life-threatening emergencies): 8.62 minutes
- Priority 2: 66.02 minutes
- Priority 3: 110.16 minutes
- Priority 4: 126.34 minutes
According to reports, that’s a 29%-57% improvement over last year’s response times for those types of calls. Chief Comeaux said, “We have to start somewhere — so I am extremely proud of the officers for getting [Priority 2] down 30%. But we’re not done yet.” For Council Member Adam Bazaldua, it’s simply not enough.
“I don’t think there should be any pride in the fact that there’s only one category of calls to 911 who’s getting a response in less than an hour from our police department. That’s a basic service that is expected from the residents that live [in Dallas],” he said.
It’s something that the Dallas Police Department is attempting to improve upon even further by hiring and training more officers, which would eventually lead to better response times since there’d be more people to respond to those calls.
The Dallas Police Department is setting new recruitment goals
Dallas Police Chief Daniel Comeaux outlined on Wednesday how he intends to increase the department’s overall effectiveness by hiring and retaining more officers, which will then lead to a reduction in response times. He said that DPD previously set a goal of recruiting around 350 officers during 2026, and they’re currently on track to exceed that with 390 new officers being added to the department.
In addition to focusing on how to retain these officers, the DPD will also be improving upon its existing Drone as First Responder program. Basically how that works is the department deploys teams of drones to calls as a way of getting there faster and determining whether a patrol unit is needed for a full response.
According to DPD, 728 calls were attended to by the drone team and 35% of those were resolved without the need for additional patrols. Aside from getting there quicker than police cars, the drones also obtain crucial information that officers responding to the scene need before arriving to determine what’s going on and what type of response is required to resolve the issue.
