San Diego County Sheriff’s Office has failed to answer 911 calls fast enough since 2022

People calling 911 during an emergency in parts of San Diego County can expect to wait. 

That’s because the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office – the main law enforcement agency for 910,000 of the county’s 3.3 million residents – has fallen short of state standards to answer 911 calls for four years straight.

Emergency centers are supposed to answer 90% of 911 calls within 15 seconds and 95% of them within 20 seconds, according to standards set by the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES). But in 2025, 1 in 4 callers waited more than 15 seconds and 1 in 5 waited more than 20 seconds before a San Diego County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher picked up. 

That makes for the longest wait time among 10 law enforcement agencies in San Diego County reviewed by inewsource. Cal OES said it notifies agencies that fail to meet the standards, but the sheriff’s office hasn’t been held accountable for consistently failing to meet the standard.

A spokesperson for the office of emergency services declined to answer questions about whether it enforces the standard or penalizes law enforcement agencies that do not meet the required 911 answer times. The state office’s guidelines say some state funding requires adhering to them. 

The sheriff’s office said elevated wait times are due to staffing issues and a high number of increasingly complex calls but that it has a plan to fill vacancies and make the office more efficient.  

It’s not an issue unique to San Diego County — 911 call wait times have fluctuated at law enforcement agencies around the country as they struggle to hire and retain dispatch officers for grueling, stressful jobs.

But the sheriff’s office’s long wait times exceed not only other law enforcement agencies in San Diego County but also similar-sized departments throughout the state, including the San Jose and San Francisco police departments and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office. 

“Improving 9-1-1 answer times remains a priority,” said Melissa Gutierrez, a communications coordinator in San Diego County. “The Sheriff’s Office continues to recruit and hire communications personnel, invest in training, and implement operational improvements designed to increase staffing levels and reduce answer times.”

She said one of the biggest problems is a staffing shortage. The sheriff’s office has 110 authorized dispatcher positions but has only 65 fully trained people in those roles. There are 27 more in training. Without more personnel, they’d still be 18 people short.

As it stands, there are about 16 dispatchers on each shift handling an average of 843 calls per day, or 35 calls per hour. Gutierrez said those calls “have become more complex, requiring dispatchers to spend additional time gathering critical information and coordinating the appropriate response before answering the next call.”

She added that, “The Sheriff’s Office has not received any formal warning or enforcement action from Cal OES related to our 9-1-1 call-answering performance. Regardless, we take our performance seriously and are actively working to improve response times.”

A difference in wait times

The sheriff’s office is the primary law enforcement agency for nine cities and all unincorporated parts of San Diego County. That’s 28% of the population, including all the residents of Del Mar, Encinitas, Imperial Beach, Lemon Grove, Poway, San Marcos, Santee, Solana Beach and Vista.

Though staffing issues have arisen in other regional law enforcement agencies, other agencies in the region have been able to meet the state’s 911 call wait time standards since 2021, the first year of inewsource’s review. 

The average 911 wait times of the nine other agencies – the police departments in Carlsbad, Chula Vista, Coronado, El Cajon, Escondido, La Mesa, National City, Oceanside and San Diego – were much less than the county’s 13.6 seconds in 2025. 

Those police departments’ wait times ranged between 1.6 seconds and 5.7 seconds. 

Across the state, the average wait was 7.8 seconds. 

But other agencies in the state fell short of the standards, too. 

Taken together, hundreds of law enforcement agencies across California picked up an average 89.9% of all calls within 15 seconds and an average 92% of them within 20 seconds.

Ask officials in those other agencies the reason for the delays and you’ll likely hear the same response. As Craig Groll, the communications manager for the El Cajon Police Department, said, “The biggest thing when it comes to 911 call answer times is probably staffing.”

The El Cajon Police Department answers 96.6% of calls within 15 seconds, and 97.7% of calls within 20 seconds, and has an average wait time of 5.25 seconds. Groll said that El Cajon has mandatory overtime for dispatchers and makes staffing a priority. 

El Cajon is also one of the police departments that recently implemented an artificial intelligence program for non-emergency calls aimed at allowing dispatchers to focus on emergencies. Department officials have touted the benefits given an increasing volume of calls.

The San Diego Police Department, which serves over 1.4 million people and fields an average of 1,795 calls each day — more than twice the average daily calls of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office — failed to meet the standard for 911 waiting times for several years recently.

While falling short from 2021-2024, SDPD met the standard in 2025 when it answered 94.1% of 911 calls within 15 seconds and 96.2% of its calls within 20 seconds. 

SDPD communications manager Ashley Nicholes said the police department had a shortage of dispatchers after the COVID-19 pandemic but in the past few years hired more staff to meet the standard. The department now has 79 fully trained dispatchers and 2 more in training, leaving it with nine vacancies in 90 budgeted positions. Nicholes said the dispatch team was “not aware” of any warnings from the state during the several years it did not meet the standard. 

A challenging job

Nicholes said dispatchers have “one of the hardest jobs.”

“They must maintain a calm demeanor while working to obtain and relay information in real-time, life-or-death situations for our community and officers in the field,” she said. “Those jobs require a specialized skillset and more than six months of training to ensure someone is ready to handle all that answering calls for service entails.” 

With long shifts and so many crises in real time, the job of a 911 dispatcher is daunting.

A May 2025 survey of nearly 1,400 emergency communications center personnel in the United States and Canada found they worried about burnout, turnover and inadequate adequate training.

Three-quarters of respondents reported open positions in their emergency call centers, and 58% reported hiring struggles in that survey by the National Emergency Number Association. Two out of three people said they feel daily preshift stress.

That association recommended agencies support staff better and implement new technology to help them with their jobs. 

Gutierrez said the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office increased training officer pay, and has 21 training officers as compared to five last year. She said that the trainers’ jobs are some of the most demanding and important, and help fill vacancies and strengthen staffing over time.

The agency pays about $37 per hour for emergency services dispatcher trainees, positions that  require no prior experience. It pays between $39 an hour and $46 an hour for dispatchers – those positions do require prior experience.

Their command center is continually staffed in Kearny Mesa, though Gutierrez said that the sheriff’s office is launching a remote communications unit to allow dispatchers to answer non-emergency calls from home. 

The department also began using AI, the aim of which is to improve efficiency and ensure that the emergency service dispatchers remain focused on priority calls. All of the interactions with the system, called Hyper, are recorded and transcribed in real time. The system is designed to transfer a call immediately to a trained dispatcher if it is an emergency or has other challenges. 

“Our goal is to meet and sustain the state’s 9-1-1 call-answering standards, and these initiatives reflect our ongoing commitment to strengthening staffing, improving operational efficiency, and enhancing service to the communities we serve,” Gutierrez said.