Information relating to 999 calls from 2020 to 2025

Your request details
Please provide:
- The time in which the force is expected to respond to 999 calls.
- The number of 999 calls received by the force in each year from 2020 to 2025.
- The number of occasions on which no police car was available to answer a 999 call in each year from 2020 to 2025.

Response
I approached the administrator for South Yorkshire Police's Incident Management System. The Smart system records the majority of calls to South Yorkshire Police requiring the specific deployment of police resources, whether reported by members of the public via 999 or 101 or 'happened upon' by officers and staff in the course of their duties. The log runs as a running commentary of an incident as it unfolds and has limited search capability. They have provided me with the below data:

Question 1
The national guidance for police forces to answer a 999 call is within 10 seconds.

Question 2

Question 3

We cannot accurately answer this question - If this was an emergency response, if we didn’t have someone available immediately then we would attempt to resource it as soon as possible. We could provide data that would indicate if officers were delayed in attending as dispatchers would write on the incident no resources available, this would be a key word search, but they wouldn’t write if ‘no police cars’ were available.

Please note, every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete.
However, it is important to note that data has been extracted from data sources used by this force for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording systems and information assets.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures/data for any requests may have limitations, and this should be taken into account when those data sets are used. 

Police forces do not use generic systems or identical procedures for capturing the data. For these reasons
this response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with responses you may
receive from other police forces.