A new report from the St. Louis Police Department shows that 911 response times have spiked.
The average police response times to lower-priority calls have more than doubled.
This analysis from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch shows St. Louis police response times increased from 18 minutes to more than 40 minutes.
According to the report, in 2015 police took 12 minutes to arrive after someone dialed 911 for a ‘priority 2’ call.
This can include a domestic incident, a fight, a call for help or a burglar in a building. Last year, the average response time more than doubled to 31 minutes.
‘Priority 3’ calls such as burglaries, auto thefts, larcenies or motorists in need of an assist went from 20 minutes to 51.
Police officials attributed this to multiple changes in policies and staffing. Between 2021 and 2025, the St. Louis Police Department lost nearly 300 sworn officers, bringing it down to 843.
Changes that a leadership and recruiting expert calls “avoidable.”
Dr. Travis Yates spent three decades in law enforcement and routinely assists agencies with recruiting. He calls the situation in St. Louis a lack of leadership that will continue to harm citizens and the hard-working cops within the agency.
“The hard truth is this is avoidable, and St. Louis is not encountering a recruiting issue; they are suffering through a leadership disaster that can easily be fixed if the correct decisions are made,” Yates told us.
Why St. Louis Cannot Fill the Gap
St. Louis is not alone. Departments across the country are competing for a shrinking pool of applicants while retirements and lateral departures pull experienced officers out the door. Several forces compound the problem at once.
Applications are down. Fewer people apply to policing today than a decade ago, and the candidates who do apply have more career options than ever. Attrition is up. Officers leave for suburban agencies, federal roles, or private sector jobs, and lateral recruitment has turned into a bidding war between neighboring departments. Hiring is slow. Many agencies still run recruitment on paper, spreadsheets, and phone tag, which means promising candidates lose interest before an offer ever lands.
Put those three pressures together, and you get exactly what St. Louis is living through. The pipeline leaks at every stage, and slow response times are the downstream result.
Yates called the officer shortage an easy fix, but it will take courageous decisions from those in charge of the agency.
The agency said they are trying to solve the crisis with “advertising,” but Yates says that’s the entire problem.
“This is not an advertising issue. It’s a recruiting issue, and there isn’t an advertising campaign on this planet that will bring St. Louis back to full staffing,” Yates said.
Yates calls for an actual recruiting initiative that works, and sadly, he sees far too many agencies spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing and advertising that will yield nothing.
A Practical Path Forward for Departments Like St. Louis
Yates said there is no single tool that will fix a staffing crisis overnight, but the path is clear. Build law enforcement recruiting strategies that combine consistent marketing, modern police recruiting software, and a hiring process fast enough to compete. Track the numbers. Measure response times, but also measure applications, time to hire, and retention, because those upstream metrics decide what the downstream emergency response looks like.
Yates warns agencies not to fall for the tricks of so-called marketing agencies that tell them they are the answer.
“What St. Louis and any other agency needs to fix this issue is a law enforcement recruiting company that has a proven track record,” Yates lamented.
Of course, we’ve known Safeguard Recruiting for years, and we also know that they have absolutely turned agencies around that were far worse than St. Louis.
The problem, as Yates alluded to, is that many agencies are stuck in a mindset that fancy advertising and videos will save them, and if that continues, the crisis built by poor leadership and their decisions will continue.
