ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Albuquerque Community Safety marked three years of service Saturday.

The City of Albuquerque established ACS back in 2020 to help cut down on service calls to police and fire departments. Since its inception, ACS has fielded 81,800 calls. 85% of those calls were diverted from the Albuquerque Police Department, according to ACS.

Because of those stats, ACS feels it’s been successful in it’s mission. Still, there is room for improvement, namely in the department’s response times.

“We’re averaging close to 4000 calls a month,” said Jodie Esquibel, the director of ACS. “The calls are going to be happening no matter what. And so, if ACS wasn’t here to be able to answer those calls, they were likely going to go to the police department, maybe some other resources as well.”

But year after year, the department’s average year-to-date response time has increased, according to the city’s transparency page — from 12 minutes and 51 seconds one year, to 14 minutes and 13 seconds the next year, to 15 minutes and seven seconds according to the report on the most recent year.

“We’re evaluating internally to see how we’re going to be able to mitigate that with the current staff that we have,” Esquibel explained. “We don’t push our responders to say, ‘hey, clear and get off the next call,’ we have calls pending because somebody that we respond to in a behavioral health crisis needs that person to be there present in every single moment. And so we operate a little bit differently in that way.”

Some of that evaluation involves taking a look at their data. They say they look at types of calls they’re seeing the most and where they’re coming from.

“We’ve always operated out of one location, because that’s the amount of staff that we’ve had. But my goal in the future is to start breaking up the city into quadrants so that our responders have a faster response time. Just like you have a fire station in a certain area,” Esquibel said.

Right, there’s no timeline for when that expansion could happen. But, ACS is looking to grow in terms of staffing. The department is looking for about 25 positions right now.