It’s 0300 on a hot, summer Saturday morning. You jolt awake to an abrasive scratching at your front door, a scratching that quickly becomes a repeated banging. Someone is trying to break in, and it’s not the Girls Scouts hawking cookies! Fumbling your way to your smart phone, you call 911, getting the sequence right on the third try. What will happen if, not when, the 911 dispatcher answers?

“IF?!” If. In parts of America, particularly large cities in blue states, it’s probable no one will answer, or if they do, there won’t be any officers available. In other parts of America—mostly red states—there will probably be an officer available, but it’s going to take them, at best, eight minutes to get to you, unless you live in a rural area, then it’s going to take a half hour or more. That’s if the responding deputy knows exactly where to go, and he’s not on the other side of the county.

Graphic: Wikimedia Commons.org, CCA-SA2.0 Generic

When someone is trying to break into your home, or is actively trying to kill you, seconds are an eternity. How, circa 2024 in America, can such slow police response be possible?

There is no such thing as an over-staffed police agency. There is virtually no such thing as a fully staffed agency. There are a variety of formulas for determining police staffing, but none end up providing an adequate number of officers. Thanks to Defund The Police lunacy, most of blue America’s police agencies are grossly understaffed. Officers that could, retired. Many left for cities and states that appreciate their police and want them to do their jobs, and many simply quit the profession. Because no competent, intelligent cop trusts the politicians, or even the public, in such places, they can’t recruit anyone but diversity hires, and have dumbed down already minimum hiring standards. And they still can’t find enough recruits.

In Flyover Country, that vast cultural wasteland where Deplorables live their meaningless, unenlightened little lives, the situation is often little better, but for different reasons. In order to place a single officer on the street 24/7/365, at least 4.5 officers must be hired. That’s three for three daily 8-hour shifts, and 1.5 to cover vacations, sick leave, training, court and a variety of other reasons officers need to be absent. That’s to provide what each agency considers a minimum staffing level, which is always less than they really need.

Even so, that usually sort of works because agencies staff their shifts based on need, which means most officers will be working on Friday and Saturday nights, and the fewest during day shifts, particularly on Sunday. In a city of 35,000 or so, there might be 6-7 officers working the weekend night shifts, and only 3-4 the day shifts. Consider those numbers if the agency is a county sheriff’s office responsible for patrolling a county the size of some of our smaller states. A deputy responding to an emergency call 60 miles away, when seconds are an eternity, is going to take at least 45 minutes to get there.

Now consider what happens when an officer—or two—gets sick on those minimally staffed shifts. And what happens when their 1.5 replacement officer is on vacation? A fanciful scenario? Not at all. Understaffed agencies require officers to work a huge amount of overtime, often double shifts, which is great for the bank account but terribly mentally and physically damaging. That inevitably results in more illness, more mistakes, and a lack of pro-active, crime-suppressing policing by officers fighting to stay awake.

What about the guy trying to break in? In blue state cities, the police aren’t coming. There are more desperate priorities, or if they are coming, it could take an hour or more. In many of those cities the police have already announced they can’t respond to most felonies in progress. They don’t have the manpower. Sorry about that, but don’t you dare hurt the criminal. That will absolutely get you—not the crook--prosecuted.

In red state cities and towns, the police are going to respond. They’ll get there as fast as they can, with as many officers as are available. How fast is that? Of the six officers on the street, two are handling another major felony in progress, one is dealing with an injury accident, and one is processing a felony crime scene, which leaves two. Unfortunately, the nearest officer is six miles away in heavy traffic. He might get there within 10 minutes, and his partner will be at least two minutes behind.

There’s an old police aphorism: “when seconds count, the police are minutes away.”

In those seconds of eternity, one reality dawns: we’re on our own. We always have been.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.