The lengthy delays that New Yorkers are facing after applying for their concealed carry permits are preventing them from being able to protect themselves from the violent predators worming their way across the Big Apple, but residents are facing other delays when relying on the NYPD to respond after a crime has been committed. 

According to the New York Post, the average response time to a 911 call in NYC is growing, and is now the worst that it’s been in decades.

It took officers an average of 15 minutes and 23 seconds to respond to 911 calls about a crime in progress in fiscal year 2024, or between July 1, 2023, and this past June 30, according to the annual Mayor’s Management Report released by the city Monday.

That average is nearly a minute longer than in FY 2023, almost 5 minutes more than four years ago — and the longest since at least the 1990s, records show.

Average response times were better in the past fiscal year for 911 calls reporting “critical” crimes — such as shootings, robberies or burglaries, the report said. Cops responded in 9 minutes and 24 seconds on average in those cases. 

Deputy Public Safety Commissioner Phil Banks, a frequent press-conference attendee on such issues, was conspicuously absent from Monday’s media scrum about the mayor’s report. Banks, his brother Terence and a third sibling, city schools chief David Banks, are targets in a wide federal probe into potential City Hall corruption. None of the three has been arrested.

Assistant Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Chauncey Parker, who was at Monday’s briefing on the mayor’s report, said the NYPD is “focusing relentlessly on how to better protect and serve people” when it comes to response times but did not give specifics.

Parker also did not say what is causing the troubling delays.

The declining number of uniformed officers is probably having some effect, but the Post says officials also blame NYC traffic and an increased number of emergency calls for the delays. 

The old saying “when seconds count, police are minutes away” is applicable here, but those New Yorkers who want to be able to protect themselves instead of waiting for a squad car to arrive are also saddled with a bureaucracy that’s taking far too long to process the applications for permits to keep a gun in the home or to carry one in public. 

The NYPD isn’t even saying how many carry permits have been approved in recent months, though Gothamist reported earlier this year that the number of applications for both premises permits and carry permits have soared since the Supreme Court struck down New York’s “may issue” concealed carry licensing regime in 2022. 

The police department is facing several lawsuits over the lengthy delays, but there’s no evidence that the litigation has undone the backlog of applications. If the NYPD is truly interested in relentlessly focusing on how to better protect and serve people, it could start by processing these applications in a timely manner. It’s bad enough that New Yorkers are forced to pay hundreds of dollars in fees before they can exercise a fundamental civil right, but it’s truly obscene that the city is making residents twiddle their thumbs for a year or more before reluctantly issuing their Second Amendment permission slips.