HOUSTON -- Last year, the Houston Police Department received more than 1.6 million 911 calls. Yet, the department is suffering through a critical manpower shortage. The shortage is now affecting how quickly officers are responding to some of the most urgent cries for help, the Local 2 Troubleshooters reported Sunday.

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Officers In Some Zip Codes Respond Slower Than Others

The most critical 911 calls are the ones where a person's life is in immediate danger. Police are supposed to respond to these calls in five minutes or less.

The city is divided into 116 police beats. The Troubleshooters spent two months researching response times in every single one of those beats. They discovered police are taking longer than five minutes in a third of Houston's neighborhoods.

Mark Brown lives in a neighborhood on the backside of Lake Houston -- a neighborhood that has to wait an average of 10.3 minutes for officers to respond to life-threatening calls.

"(It's) kind of scary. It's real scary," he said. "A whole lot can go wrong in 10 minutes."

Brown's neighborhood is not the only one.

HPD records showed neighborhoods around Ellington Field also waited an average of 10 minutes for officers to respond to life-threatening calls.

It's not just outlying areas -- an area off Interstate 10 inside the Beltway has an average 9.7-minute wait time.

Another area inside the 610 Loop around Durham and T.C. Jester waited an average of 6.2 minutes.

"I would like to get saved. I would like the call to be prompt," resident Veronica Herrera said.

"It should take the same time. I mean, what's the difference?" resident Adolph Cervantes said.

The difference comes from HPD having to compensate for a lack of manpower. The bulk of officers are deployed to areas with the highest crime, but that means neighborhoods with traditionally lower crime rates are left with fewer officers. That also means police take longer to respond to calls for help in these areas.

"Are you concerned about those response times in certain neighborhoods?," Local 2's Robert Arnold asked.

"Sure, we're always concerned in reference to response times," HPD Chief Harold Hurtt said.

Hurtt said he knows his department is struggling to keep up in certain areas, but it's a problem that's not going to get better anytime soon.

"In the time since I've been here we've lost probably 500 officers. We're hiring them 70 at a time, so it's going to be a long time before we can catch up," Hurtt said.

Hans Marticiuc is the president of the Houston Police Officer's Union. He said it is not just the public, he's also hearing from officers who are worried about getting backup quickly.

"It's a concern and it ought to be a concern for the citizens," Marticiuc said. "I'm hoping our elected officials hear this stuff, see this information, and realize staffing over here has got to be the highest priority because it's a public safety issue."

Local 2 took the findings of its investigation to Houston City Councilman Adrian Garcia, a former Houston police officer who is the head of council's public safety committee. He said until the Troubleshooters investigation, he'd never seen response times broken down neighborhood-by-neighborhood. Instead he said he was always given reports showing a citywide average.

"Citywide average is not a good way to look at your resources in the city of Houston. We are geographically spread out," Garcia said. "This shows me, this helps me understand what I'm hearing from our police officers. They're strapped. They got to be a lot of places all at once."

Garcia said he is not only going to push for HPD to get the money it needs for additional manpower, but to also make sure the department enters an aggressive recruiting phase.

Right now, the Houston police department has fewer than 4,800 officers. That's down from 5,400. And out of those 4,800, 200 officers were sent to work in the jail as replacements for civilian jailers who were laid off to help the city trim its budget.

Houston Police Response Times:

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Find Your Neighborhood Code: Map Of Houston Police Beats
Click On Response Time Spreadsheets Below

View All Response Times
View Average Response Time
View Priority 1 Calls: Life-threatening situation is occurring
View Priority 2 Calls: Life-threatening situation has just occurred, or property-threatening situation in progress
View "Calls For Service"

Call Priority Explanations:

Priority 1: Life-threatening situation is occurring
Priority 2: Life-threatening situation has just occurred, or property-threatening situation in progress
Priority 3: Delayed reports of crime-serious
Priority 4: Delayed report of crime-non serious
Priority 5: Report calls with no evidence (follow-up investigation)
Priority 6: Officer "on-views" crime