RPD’s response times have almost doubled. Can Raleigh hire enough officers to fix it?
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- FY2027 budget adds the first 23 of 69 new officer positions.
- As of May 27, the department had 720 officers and 75 vacancies.
- Average response time rose from 7 minutes in 2014 to just over 13 minutes in 2024
The Raleigh Police Department is taking nearly twice as long to respond to high-priority 911 calls as it did 10 years ago.
And the department has fewer officers than it did a decade ago.
The city is aiming to add 69 new officer positions over the next three years to help police respond to scenes faster.
“We’ve not added any positions for police since 2016,” Mayor Janet Cowell said in an interview in May.
The budget the City Council passed for fiscal year 2027 adds the first 23 of those positions for $3.8 million.
That will bring the department up to 818 sworn police officer positions when the new fiscal year starts July 1.
Just because the positions are budgeted, however, doesn’t mean they’ll be filled.
As of May 27, roughly 75 of the police department’s current 795 positions were empty — almost 10% — meaning the department has 720 actual officers.
For comparison, in August 2016, the department had 761 active officers.
Cowell said it can be difficult to fill police jobs but hopes recent pay increases “give us a fighting chance.”
What’s the recruiting holdup?
Police Chief Rico Boyce says expanding the police department is a priority.
When he took over in March 2025, he said his goal is to eventually expand the department to 1,000 officers.
But many police departments have struggled to recruit since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020 and subsequent protests.
In the 1990s, Raleigh’s police academies consistently graduated 60 or more officers, Boyce said. Now, many of the officers from those large academy classes are retiring.
Today, Boyce said, classes today typically start with just over 60 recruits and graduate far fewer.
For the 131st Academy last year, that translated into 27 new officers, ABC 11 reported.
More recently, the 132nd academy class graduated 32 of the 57 recruits who attended the academy.
But even newly graduated officers may not stay for long.
A 2024 survey from the International Association of Chiefs of Police found most police officer resignations occur within the first five years of an officer’s career.
“While the number of recruits entering and graduating may fluctuate from class to class, our commitment to their success remains constant,” police department spokesperson Lt. David Davis wrote in an email to The News & Observer. “We strive to graduate every recruit and are confident that our academy staff provides the training, mentorship, and support needed to prepare them for a successful career in law enforcement.”
How have response times and crime rates changed?
In 2014, the average RPD response to high-priority 911 calls took just over 7 minutes, according to data in the city’s budget. Those calls involve incidents that are in progress or just occurred that could result in life-threatening danger or severe property damage, according to the police department
And the clock starts from when an officer is dispatched, not from when the call comes in.
In 2024, according to the most recent data provided by the city, RPD’s response time had increased to just over 13 minutes.
Part of that increase reflects a switch to a computer-aided 911 dispatch system in 2019, but the police department did not respond to a question asking exactly how the new system has affected response times.
Davis said in just the past five years, response times to high-priority calls have increased by a minute and a half.
One reason it’s taking police longer to get to crime and accident scenes may be that more people are calling them. Raleigh grew from roughly 450,000 people in 2016 to about 506,000 people in 2025, according to the U.S. Census.
Despite slower response times, the rate at which the department solves most crimes has stayed fairly steady since 2019, according to data collected by the FBI.
And Raleigh’s violent crime rate actually dropped 5.1% from 2019 to 2025, according to the FBI data.
Property crime, however, has gone up more than 50% since 2019. The crime rate per 100,000 people went from about 305 incidents in 2019 to an estimated 480 incidents in 2025, according to the city’s budgets.
BEHIND THE STORY
MOREIt’s not ideal to compare crime rates from 2019 to 2025 with response times recorded in Raleigh’s fiscal years 2015 through 2025. However, crime data has undergone a dramatic shift in recent years.
A few years ago, the FBI mandated a shift from recording crime data using “summary reporting system” statistics to a system called NIBRS.
The key difference between the two is that NIBRS does not use something called the “hierarchy rule.” The rule essentially meant that only the most serious offense in any multiple-offense incident is used. That led to an undercount of the actual amount of crimes happening.
The switch to NIBRS means that it’s difficult to compare crime data in the past seven or so years to data from before that, because they’re using different systems. Also, the FBI has a gap in its publicly available crime data from Raleigh in a period lasting from about 2014 to 2019.
The state of North Carolina also tracks crime data for agencies in the state. However, its most recent crime data is from 2024.
What’s Chief Boyce’s hiring strategy?
Boyce acknowledged the academies face significant dropouts.
“It hurts when we hire an applicant, we invest in them and they fail out of the academy,” he said. “That’s not a recipe for success.”
Currently, Raleigh has two police academy classes per year. Boyce wants to add a third.
He said the police department has also started intern programs for college students. There are two programs, one that runs just over two weeks maximum and another that could last as long as 50 days.
The hope is that people who go through that program know more about what the job entails and are more prepared for the academy, he said.
He also said that the department “prehires” recruits, letting them do things at the police department before the academy, which provides a similar benefit to internships.
In addition, the police department has created a lateral academy, which trains officers hired from other agencies, both in state and outside North Carolina, in RPD’s methods.
Boyce said a large part of the recruiting strategy is to hire officers from outside North Carolina and put them through the lateral academy.
Finally, the city has added a combined 14% to the salaries of public safety employees in the past two years, which Boyce hopes will help keep more RPD officers from leaving the agency for higher pay.
That’s translated into a starting pay of about $61,000 for police officer recruits, according to the city website. Durham, for comparison, starts police recruits at about $52,000. Wake Forest starts officers out at around $65,000.
How will the new officers be used?
Boyce plans to assign most of the 23 new officer positions to northeast Raleigh, which has grown in recent years, he said.
City Council Member Megan Patton, whose district is in northeast Raleigh, said she hears from residents about public safety.
“When I first joined the city council, I did receive feedback on slow response times to fender-benders, since officers were deployed to more emergent situations,” she wrote in an email to The N&O. “We’ve made investments in our Civilian Crash Investigators since that time. So, while I don’t tend to get direct feedback about slow RPD response times, I’m committed to making data-informed investments to add personnel where it is most needed based on call volume.”
She said some residents feel safer with more police while others don’t.
“I will continue to advocate for both investment and innovation in public safety arenas,” she wrote. “I am confident that Chief Boyce is using call volume and other data to drive the allocation of resources. But I also believe we must use non-police resources to facilitate safer environments as well — for instance, we can use better road design to slow cars, rather than relying exclusively on police for speed enforcement.”
NC Reality Check is an N&O series holding those in power accountable and shining a light on public issues that affect the Triangle or North Carolina. Have a suggestion for a future story? Email realitycheck@newsobserver.com.
This story was originally published June 24, 2026 at 2:10 PM.
