Christina Yuna Lee and police inaction.

Next Wednesday, I’m going to New Jersey to meet the father of Christina Yuna Lee. Lee was stabbed 40 times by a homeless man who broke into her apartment after following her home.

After neighbors called 911, police arrived in under 5 minutes. Then they waited in the hallway, for an hour and 20 minutes. They claimed the door was “barricaded” (you know, like in Uvalde) but I’ve been to Lee’s apartment in Chinatown—a drunk frat guy could have turned over a trash can to stand on and reach the fire escape to get in through her window.

Or the police could have knocked on the door of the neighbors who called the police and reached the fire escape that way. Or, I don’t know, any number of things, besides not helping a woman screaming for help. I imagine these are patrol rookies and don’t want to vilify them—though the gruesome thing here is that probably if the neighbors hadn’t called 911, and instead Good Samaritan helped her, she might be alive.

But more galling than inaction by the first responders is that the specialized unit that finally showed up and beat down the door took an hour and 20 minutes to arrive at the scene. The Emergency Services Unit bills itself as the Navy Seal version of the NYPD. They literally boast about rapeling out of helicopters. There’s one in every burough and they’re supposed to be on 24/7. WTF cop bar were they drinking at that it took that long? Lee’s family is suing the NYPD. They believe a quicker response could have saved her life. Instead, she was left to bleed out in her bathtub. Usually I’m annoyed I have to pay higher taxes because NYPD can’t stop groping Black teenagers, resulting lawsuits, but in this case I hope the family gets the biggest settlement possible. Although, to state the obvious, the biggest settlement possible doesn’t replace a daughter and I’m low-grade terrified about how sad it’ll be to talk to Lee’s father.

The data show that police response time has slowed in almost every municipality. And before someone goes, “Well that’s because of the George Floy-
." No. The “Ferguson Effect” is the equivalent of flat-earth theory for right-wingers and self-proclaimed liberal contrarians. Given how few violent crimes police solve—the clearance rate is abysmal pretty much everywhere—it’s pretty unlikely that a police slow down would lead to a significant rise in homicides. And, for the sake of argument, if it did—that would be the equivalent of firefighters letting houses burn down because they’re miffed by protestors. In other words, not a great defense of US policing.

ANYWAY. I’m working on a longer project about police response time, particularly in homicide cases. There are at least two other horrifying examples.

Racheal Abraham, in Portland, Oregon, had reported her abusive boyfriend to the police multiple times. One day she called 911 early in the morning. Her call got cut off. But one would think that if a known domestic violence victim picks up the phone and calls 911, you might want the police to check things out. The neighbors also called the police. The police only came when he called 911 to tell them she was dead. He’d stabbed and choked her to death, while her kids were in the house.

The mass shooting of a family of Honduran immigrants by their neighbor — the father hid in a closet and called 911 a total of 5 times again, as the gunman was slaughtering his family—may have been prevented if officers had arrived upon getting the first call about a noise complaint that a crazy person was shooting his gun in the yard next door, keep the family’s baby up.

The 911 dispatcher kept telling the father that police were at the scene, prompting him to ask why then, the killer was still killing his family.

In Lee’s case, the Mayor and everyone on down blamed bail reform. In the Abraham case, the Portland bail fund got totally thrown under the bus and blamed, even by the allegedly progressive DA, because they’d bailed Abraham’s killer out. And very few outlets covered the slow police response in the shootings of the Honduran immigrant family.

It’s like police have an invisibility shield when anything goes wrong. Lawmakers in blue cities are owned by the police unions. Local papers rely on police departments for access to “if it bleeds it leads” crime coverage. And many people at prestige national publications are complete morons.

Which is all to say, please get in touch if you have any tips for academic research on police response time or other examples of slow police response time leading to tragedy.