HOUSTON -- Note: The following story is a verbatim transcript of an Investigators story that aired on Sunday, Nov. 3, 2007, on KPRC Local 2 at 10 p.m.

Local 2 Investigates how quickly Houston police officers respond to you and your family's most desperate calls for help. As HPD scrambles to replenish its sagging ranks, officers on the street are struggling to keep up with the demand.

KPRC Local 2 investigative reporter Robert Arnold has been crunching the numbers to show us how the department's manpower shortage is causing you to wait longer for help.

For the Houston police officers patrolling our streets, the most urgent calls for help are classified as "priority one." That means someone's life is in immediate danger, and that's why officers are supposed to respond to these "priority one" calls in five minutes or less.

"That is an important performance indicator for us. We try to keep an eye as closely on that as we can," Executive Assistant Chief Tim Oettmeier said.

But when Local 2 Investigates analyzed three years worth of police response times, breaking down Houston neighborhood by neighborhood, we discovered more and more parts of the city are waiting longer than five minutes for police to respond to these life-threatening, "priority one" calls.

"What I hear from officers is we are short and could we get some help out here," outgoing Houston Police Officers’ Union president Hans Marticiuc said.

In 2004, police were taking longer than 5 minutes to respond to a third of Houston's neighborhoods. Two years later it was 43%. Through the first quarter of this year it was half the city.

"Any given shift you probably don't have more than 200 to 250 officers out on the street," Marticiuc said.

"For the entire city?" Arnold asked.

"Uh, huh," Marticiuc said.

Large outlying areas are especially challenging. Neighborhoods on the backside of Lake Houston, around Bush Intercontinental Airport, off I-10 past the Beltway, off Highway 288 are all waiting anywhere from 6 to 9 minutes for officers to respond to life-threatening calls.

"Sixty seconds, 120 seconds, 180 seconds make all the difference in the world,” Marticiuc said.

But it's not just the suburbs. Some neighborhoods inside the Loop and near downtown are also seeing more than 6 minute wait times.

"I'd like to say it's alarming, but it's almost to be expected with the shortage of personnel that we have," Marticiuc said.

Here's the dilemma. The bulk of officers is deployed to neighborhoods with the highest crime rates. That leaves neighborhoods with traditionally lower crime rates thin, and that means it takes officers longer to get to those areas when you call for help. Factor in traffic and the number of calls for help officers are handling at the time, the wait gets even longer.

"It's really an allocation issue and it's a very tough challenge," Oettmeier said.

It's not just those dialing 911. Local 2 Investigates heard from officers who are concerned about getting backup quickly.

"There are times when we don't have enough officers out there to be able to do that," Oettmeier said. "We are concerned about that and we want the officers to use extreme caution."

Oettmeier says while the department is scrambling to bolster its sagging ranks, some steps are being taken to bring down response times.

For example, HPD is now staggering shift change. This way calls for help don't stack during the lag time between officers getting on and off duty. Plus, there's a new $24 million overtime program.

"Hopefully, that will drive down not only the response times but also the number of calls that we're getting," Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt said.

Just to let you know what officers are facing, at the end of 2006 the department had between 4,700 and 4,800 officers, yet HPD received more than 1,600,000 calls for help.

And as HPD works to get these response times down, you'll hear from one woman who says her calls for help were never answered. That story is tomorrow at 6:50 a.m.

HPD is hoping to add 560 new officers to its ranks over the next three years and a total of 1,200 more officers by the year 2010.