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Josephine Martinez dialed 911 while rushing to her house. Her daughter's live-in boyfriend was on the way to "kill" her daughter and their two children and may have a gun, she told dispatchers.
When she arrived, the man had come and gone but promised to be back soon. Martinez, 68, dialed again for help. By the time West Valley City police showed up - 16 minutes, 9 seconds after her initial call - he had returned, punched his girlfriend in the face and pushed around Martinez and the boys.
Although officers apologized for arriving late, the experience left Martinez with one thought about the responsiveness of police in her city: "It's a joke."
A Salt Lake Tribune analysis found the incident is just one example of something that occurs more often in West Valley City than nearly every other city in Salt Lake County: double-digit response times to the most serious emergency calls.
When someone calls police to report a serious crime in progress - from a burglary to a shooting - it takes West Valley cops an average of 11 minutes, 45 seconds to arrive. That's nearly twice the wait Salt Lake City residents experience and the slowest response among 10 Salt Lake County police agencies that provided data for the analysis.
Countywide, agencies on average respond to Priority One calls - generally defined as in-progress calls that require immediate attention - in 8 minutes and 15 seconds.
The Tribune found response times to Priority One calls were much longer than those reported by some departments to city leaders. Departments had skewed averages by including "zero" response times from officer-generated traffic stops, and excluding the time dispatchers took to contact officers.
'No way to justify that': Police response to violent crimes such as shootings, robberies and assaults in West Valley City was slower than most other county agencies, which typically respond to them in under 8 minutes, according to the Tribune analysis.
For domestic violence - the most common type of emergency call - West Valley City police respond on average just short of 17 minutes. If that domestic situation involves a weapon, the response is more than 10 minutes.
Renee Layton, who heads a neighborhood watch group in Diamond Summit, often worried officers would have trouble reaching her tucked-away West Valley City neighborhood during an emergency. But, she said, she never imagined an 11-minute wait.
"That's horrible," Layton said. "If someone is in my home with a gun, that's a matter of life or death."
The results also came as a surprise to West Valley City Police Chief Thayle "Buzz" Nielsen, who called response to emergencies "the backbone" of policing. The department typically includes officer-initiated calls in its response times, shaving minutes off of the average.
Nielsen said he knew his officers were getting to calls slower than he would like and cited a lack of manpower as the main reason. The department's last increase in the number of officers came in 2004, when 12 were added. But Nielsen said he never realized responses to emergencies were in the double digits.
"Eleven and 12 minutes, there's just no way to justify that," Nielsen said.
Too busy: Even so, many factors contribute to how fast officers arrive when someone calls 911 for help. Officers say they will drop everything to get to a Priority One call, but must rely on cues from dispatchers who provide details on what is happening when they receive more than one emergency call at a time.
Responding officers could be held by the work they are doing at the time, traffic and the distance the officer is from the scene. Sometimes an officer may neglect to inform dispatch that he has arrived, making a response appear longer than it actually was.
Seven agencies that contract to use dispatchers at Salt Lake Valley Emergency Communications Center (VECC) - Midvale, Sandy, South Jordan, South Salt Lake, West Jordan, Murray, and West Valley City - had slower response times than the three that don't, according to the Tribune analysis. The agencies contracting with VECC did not provide data showing how long dispatchers take to get calls to officers.
William Harry, executive director of VECC, said the dispatch center cannot calculate its dispatch hold times, but that the center's target is 45 to 60 seconds to reach officers during Priority One calls.
Priority One calls made to Salt Lake City's dispatch center take an average of 2 minutes and 23 seconds to reach an available officer, according to the department's dispatch data.
In December, Harry said, he discovered flaws in VECC that kept a quarter of all callers on hold an average of 20 seconds. Those numbers have improved in recent months, he said, and a study group will examine issues affecting response times more closely.
Mary Hanson, a neighborhood watch leader for West Jordan's Crystal Ridge neighborhood, said a day spent riding with a patrol officer opened her eyes to the obstacles officers face when responding to emergencies.
"An officer gets a call during rush hour through construction and has to get clear across town - there's a lot of factors that go into it," Hanson said. "I think people expect them to be there instantly, but there's more to it."
For cities using VECC dispatchers, departments with more officers per capita tend to respond faster. But even in West Jordan - where there are a third fewer officers per capita than in West Valley - officers get to crime scenes three minutes faster on average.
Nielsen said the comparison to West Jordan is unfair, calling that city a "bedroom community," which has fewer emergency calls and less traffic congestion.
Indeed, West Jordan reported less than half the number of serious crimes for the first half of 2007 than West Valley City, according to the most recent data available.
But figures provided by both departments show that West Jordan also devotes a larger portion of its officers to patrol. So while West Jordan is budgeted for 87 fewer sworn officers than West Valley, it has just 11 fewer patrol officers.
West Valley's slow response times are an indication that often there are more Priority One calls coming in than officers available to respond to them, Harry said.
'No one has died': Richard Larson, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor whose study on response times helped create the nationwide 911 system, said how fast an officer arrives is "very, very important" for Priority One emergencies.
Larson's study found dispatch procedures and police manpower were two of the main factors contributing to slow response times. He said West Valley City's stated average that officers have just 30 percent of their job time free from calls indicates the department does not have enough officers on the street.
"That would definitely contribute to [slow responses]," Larson said. "That must mean that there are many times that they are fully booked, that there's no officers available for emergencies."
In his research, Larson said he often found departments reported response times differently and many used only the officer's drive time, which he called misleading. The Tribune found similar inconsistencies among police agencies in Salt Lake County.
Late last year, Nielsen provided West Valley City Councilman Corey Rushton with numbers showing that the department responds to the most serious emergencies in 2 minutes, 33 seconds and discussed drastic improvements in response to less serious calls handled over the telephone, Rushton said.
The Tribune calculated response times without officer-generated traffic stops (when an officer pulls over a car and reports it to dispatchers) and used the universally accepted definition of a response time: from the time the 911 call is placed to the time an officer arrives. Nielsen said he planned to use this definition in future reports.
The more accurate response-time average jolted Rushton.
"If you're in your house with an armed intruder, that's an eternity," he said.
In West Jordan, police in the most recent annual report for fiscal 2006 told the City Council its response time to Priority One calls was 2 minutes, 12 seconds. The actual average response to calls generated by citizens in fiscal 2006 was 8 minutes and 23 seconds, according to the Tribune's analysis of data provided by the department.
West Jordan City Councilwoman Melissa Johnson said she, too, was unaware the department's average was based on travel time and included traffic stops. But, she said, "As far as I know, no one has died because of slow responses."
West Jordan Police Chief Ken McGuire declined interview requests for this story.
'The right to feel safe': The Salt Lake City Police Department tracks its response times closely, with a goal of reaching Priority One offenses within 6 minutes of of the 911 call, said Asst. Chief Terry Fritz, who oversees patrol.
"The first few minutes are so important in apprehending bad guys and saving lives," Fritz said. "If it's a shooting, we can get a paramedic on the scene and start administrating first aid. If we're talking a robbery, we can get there before the bad guy gets too far away, as well as getting fresh evidence before it's trampled on."
The department just finished installing GPS trackers on every patrol car to allow dispatchers to determine the closest car to a scene more quickly, Fritz said.
Two of the most common ways to improve response times include adding patrol officers and rearranging where and when they work.
West Valley City added a fourth, overlapping patrol schedule two years ago in an effort to get to emergency calls faster, Nielsen said. But the effort seemed to have a small effect on the most serious calls - response to Priority One calls in 2007 was only 20 seconds faster than in 2004 - according to department data.
Now, Nielsen said he is pondering realigning patrol beats that have remained the same for 20 years, despite changing crime trends in the city. The only real solution, he said, is to hire more officers.
Rushton, the West Valley City councilman, learned the importance of quick emergency responses first-hand last fall as he went door to door campaigning. A vicious pit bull nipped at his heels, he said, and an animal control officer in the immediate area was there in seconds to help.
"I really can't think of anything that is more of a priority," Rushton said. "That's what people expect from the government - the right to feel safe and secure when they're walking down the street and a responsive government."
In light of The Tribune's findings, Rushton said the City Council has begun examining the issue and the city manager has recommended an audit of police service calls to identify the problems. As the city expands, he said, leaders need to ensure that they are providing adequate service to those already living within city boundaries.
"We should get the response times down before the growth occurs," he said.
Martinez, the grandmother in West Valley City, said the two officers who responded to her emergency in October were apologetic when they arrived, telling her they were stuck on other calls. They stayed with Martinez an hour and a half until they had to leave on another call, she said.
"I was just glad to see him," Martinez said. "Although he was too late."
Tribune computer assisted reporting editor Tony Semerad contributed to this report.