Snapshot shows callers wait more than 30 minutes

THIRTY-SEVEN minutes. That's the average time it takes for police to start driving to crimes across Queensland.

THIRTY-SEVEN minutes. That's the average time it takes for police to start driving to crimes across Queensland.

The Courier-Mail has obtained a 24-hour snapshot of calls to Queensland's major police centres that shows stations take up to six hours to dispatch officers to some incidents and calls for assaults, sudden deaths and suicide attempts are taking hours longer than they should.

But despite the worrying statistics, the State Government and Queensland police have refused to implement benchmarks and a thorough record-keeping system like police in NSW.

Among the disturbing delays on March 6 this year was the two hours it took to send officers to an offence against a child in Cairns.

It took four hours for police to dispatch a vehicle to a person attempting suicide near Redcliffe at 10pm, while more than 30 minutes passed before police started driving to where a dead baby was found near Pinkenba in Brisbane's east.

It took 22 minutes on average to respond to the 64 assaults reported on March 6.

Responding to one assault in Tugun took more than an hour.

Officers say a lack of staff and mountains of paperwork are to blame.

"Officers do their best to attend to all calls in a timely manner. However, inefficiencies in the system are hampering their efforts," said a police union spokesman.

There were no code 1 jobs involving "danger to human life" on March 6 and 98 per cent were deemed code 3 or "routine matters".

These so-called "routine" jobs included several assaults, sudden deaths, suicide attempts and one reported rape at Surfers Paradise.

Police say some of the calls "that looked serious" were not urgent and others related to incidents that had occurred the day or even the week before.

NSW police aim to respond to routine calls within 15 minutes under a benchmarking system that has been resisted in Queensland.

NSW police have recently announced a goal to respond to 80 per cent of all calls within 10 minutes by 2011.

The details of the more than 2000 jobs called into Queensland's five largest communication centres on March 6 were obtained under Right to Information laws.

Police Minister Neil Roberts said he could not comment on the operational matters of police but that the overwhelming majority of incidents were responded to in a timely manner.

The Government was committed to putting more officers on the beat, he said.

But Opposition police spokesman Vaughan Johnson said Mr Robert's promises were "just hot air" and police were "too busy behind desks chasing paper to be out chasing criminals".

POLICE RESPONSE TO ASSAULTS

March 6, 2010

Number of incidents .....................................................64

Average dispatch time............................................22min

Longest dispatch time (Tugun at 8.43am)....1h 10min