How Long Does the Bexar County Sheriff Take to Arrive?
The Sheriff’s own dispatch record carries the moment every call was received and the moment the first unit reached it. This page publishes the wait, grouped by the priority the County itself gave the call. It also keeps the record: the Sheriff’s feed holds a rolling thirty days, and everything before that is held here because it is published nowhere else.
Every figure here is a median. The arithmetic mean of these same calls is far higher, because a small number wait many hours and a mean lets those few decide the headline. The longest waits are real and they are in the ninetieth-percentile column, not averaged away.
Response time follows the priority the call was given
| Priority, as the County recorded it | Calls | Median | Slowest one in ten |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority 1 too few calls to read as a rate | 19 | 7 min | 16 min |
| Priority 2 | 109 | 10 min | 27 min |
| Priority 3 | 4,308 | 15 min | 52 min |
| Priority 4 | 5,249 | 17 min | 1h 05m |
| Priority 6 | 752 | 22 min | 1h 21m |
| Priority 7 too few calls to read as a rate | 7 | 0 min | 39 min |
Priority 1 is the most urgent. The ladder is monotonic, which is what you would hope for and is not guaranteed by anything. Priority 7 is not an urgency at all: those rows are prisoner and juror transport, and there are single figures of them.
By patrol division
| Division | Calls | Median | Slowest one in ten |
|---|---|---|---|
| ALPHA | 2,641 | 12 min | 42 min |
| Central Operations | 473 | 13 min | 1h 05m |
| CHARLIE | 3,056 | 19 min | 1h 05m |
| BRAVO | 1,367 | 17 min | 56 min |
| DELTA | 2,907 | 19 min | 1h 09m |
A division covering more ground with the same number of deputies will show a longer median, and this record publishes neither the area nor the staffing, so the difference between these divisions is described and not explained.
By hour of the day
Median wait by the hour the call came in, local time. Bars are the median, so an hour with few calls is drawn the same height as a busy one at the same wait; the call count is in each bar's tooltip.
The calls that wait longest
| Call type, as the Sheriff records it | Calls | Median | Slowest one in ten | Have an arrival time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burglary/ Building ^ | 42 | 48 min | 2h 31m | 97.6% |
| Crash/ Report ^ | 43 | 30 min | 3h 06m | 88.4% |
| Criminal Mischief | 81 | 29 min | 1h 45m | 92.6% |
| Assault/ Report ^ | 44 | 26 min | 1h 27m | 97.7% |
| Telephone Harassment ^ | 40 | 26 min | 2h 01m | 70% |
| Animal/ Dog | 194 | 25 min | 1h 21m | 92.8% |
| Theft | 182 | 25 min | 1h 16m | 84.1% |
| Abandoned Vehicle | 173 | 25 min | 1h 28m | 98.8% |
| Theft/ Vehicle ^ | 55 | 25 min | 1h 13m | 98.2% |
| Found/ Property | 44 | 25 min | 1h 39m | 95.5% |
| Damaged Property ^ | 175 | 24 min | 1h 21m | 92.6% |
| Civil Matter/ Custody ^ | 50 | 24 min | 53 min | 90% |
| Burglary/ Vehicle ^ | 58 | 23 min | 1h 49m | 91.4% |
| Information | 631 | 22 min | 1h 29m | 78.6% |
| Traffic Viol/ Non-Hazard ^ | 59 | 21 min | 1h 31m | 93.2% |
Only call types with at least 40 calls are ranked, because a median over a handful of calls is one shift's luck. The last column is the share of that type carrying an arrival time at all, and it belongs beside the median rather than in a footnote: where it is low, the calls that are missing are not a random sample of that type.
What is not in these figures
| Excluded | Calls | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Calls an officer started | 89 | Traffic stops and patrol checks. There is nobody to respond to and the recorded wait is zero minutes. |
| Other agencies' calls | 187 | The Sheriff's dispatch also handles 12 small city police departments and marshals. Their calls are not his response times. |
| No arrival time recorded | 596 | Counted, never guessed at. The share is published per call type above. |
| Arrival before the call | 3 | A clock or dispatch-system artefact, not a fast response. Excluded rather than rounded to zero, which would say a unit was already there. |
The archive, which is the reason this page exists
| Month | Days held | Calls | Median | Slowest one in ten |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08 part month | 30 | 11,043 | 16 min | 1h |
The Sheriff's own feed publishes a rolling thirty days. A month marked part month is one this archive began part-way through, and it is marked because a partial month is not comparable with a whole one. Everything older than the source's thirty-day window is held here because it is published nowhere else.
What this record cannot tell you
- The Sheriff publishes no target response time, so nothing on this page is late. What the record does carry is the priority the County itself gave each call, and the figures are grouped by it.
- Every figure is a median, never an average. The average is far higher than the median because a small number of calls wait many hours, and an average lets those few decide the headline.
- A response time is the minutes from the call being received to the first unit arriving. It is not how long the problem took to resolve.
- Calls an officer started are excluded, because there is nobody to respond to. Every priority-zero call in the record is a traffic stop and its response time is zero minutes, which measures nothing.
- The Sheriff’s dispatch also handles calls for several small city police departments and marshals. Those are counted separately and are not inside any figure on this page.
- About one call in twenty has no recorded arrival time, and those are not spread evenly across call types. The share of each type that carries one is published beside its response time, because a type whose slowest calls lack an arrival time would otherwise look fast.
- This page holds more of this record than the source does. The Sheriff publishes a rolling thirty days; everything before that window is kept here because it is published nowhere else.
- These calls are not comparable with San Antonio Police figures. Different agency, different area, and a different record: the two must never be added or divided into one another.
- The record locates every call to an address. Individual calls are deliberately not mapped or listed: a welfare check or a mental health call at a recorded address identifies a household.
Why there is no late rate on this page
The sibling tool for San Antonio 311 has one. This record does not support it.
The San Antonio 311 tool scores the City against SLADate, a deadline the City wrote for itself on every single request, and its central finding is that a late rate is meaningless without it: Animal Care Services misses 0.4% of a sixty-day promise and 27.7% of a five-day one, same department, same year.
The Sheriff publishes no target at all. Not per call, not per priority, not anywhere in the record or beside it. So this page cannot say a call was late, and it does not estimate what a reasonable wait would have been, because that number would be ours rather than the County’s.
What the record does carry is a priority on every call, assigned by the County at the moment it was taken. Response time follows it in order, from the most urgent to the least. That is the honest version of the same question, and it is checkable against the same file.
The thirty-day window
This is the whole reason the page exists, and it is a deadline rather than a feature.
The Sheriff’s service layer is named Last30Days, and it means it. Read on 2026-09-01 it held 30 days and not one more. There is no archive behind it, no annual release, and no second copy: the thirty-first day is simply gone from the only place it was ever published.
So from the first refresh onward this page holds a record the Sheriff’s own website does not. That is the same position the 311 tool occupies, except that the City keeps twelve months and drops the thirteenth, while here the horizon is thirty days. Every week of delay costs a week of the record permanently.
Keeping it is harder than it looks. A median cannot be merged: the median of thirty daily medians is not the median of the month, and no arithmetic recovers it. So this archive stores the full distribution of waiting times, one count per whole minute, which merges by addition and lets the median and the ninetieth percentile be computed exactly over any span, forever. Each day is folded in once, keyed by its date, so a refresh that meets the same day twice adds nothing.
Why individual calls are not mapped
Every call carries a location. That is exactly the problem.
Almost every record in this file has a latitude and longitude, and only two in the window read do not. A pin map would be straightforward to build and would be the most shareable thing on this site.
It is deliberately not built. These calls include welfare checks, mental health crisis calls, emergency detentions and domestic disturbances, recorded at the address they happened at, in a county where a great many addresses are the only house on their road. Aggregated by priority or by patrol division, that record answers a public question about a public service. Plotted as dots it answers a question about identifiable households, and no caveat under the map undoes that.
The same refusal already applies on the crash and injury map, which lists the ranked road network rather than the crashes nearest your address, for the same reason.
These are not San Antonio Police numbers
Different agency, different ground, and a record that does not contain the same thing.
The Sheriff polices unincorporated Bexar County. San Antonio Police cover the city. The two do not overlap and their call records are not the same measurement, so nothing on this page may be added to, divided into, or compared against the crime map or the driving-call figures. This is the same rule that keeps three separate counts apart across the data center pages, applied to two agencies instead of three registers.
There is a second wrinkle inside the Sheriff’s own file. His dispatch also handles calls for 12 small city police departments and marshals’ offices that contract their dispatching to the county, 187 calls in the window read. Those are counted, listed and kept out of every figure on this page: a response time computed over all of them would partly be a measurement of somebody else’s department.
Use the data
The archive and the call-type table, as JSON and CSV, with no key and no signup.
sa-sheriff.json carries the findings and the full archive, including the per-minute distributions that make every median reproducible over any span. sa-sheriff.csv is the call-type table: calls, median, ninetieth percentile, and the share of each type carrying an arrival time at all.
That last column is not optional and the CSV header says so. About one call in twenty has no recorded arrival, and they are not spread evenly: some call types are missing three in ten. A median computed over the rest of such a type reads faster than the type actually is, so the coverage rate travels with every median on this page, in the file, and in the download.
Share it with someone who lives outside the city limits.
Other San Antonio tools
Same method, a different public record. Each one states what its record cannot answer.
Crime Map Building Permits Bar & Restaurant Revenue Aggressive Driving Trail Accessibility License Plate Readers Data Centers Data Center Zoning 311 Response Times Data Center Corroboration Data Center Environmental Record Bond Projects Council District Lookup Sheriff Response Times County Capital Projects Police Response Times
All 16 are free, with no signup and no email wall, and the public API behind them needs no key.
Who publishes this
These tools are built and maintained by BrandShyp LLC, a San Antonio software firm. We sell data, software and accessibility work to public agencies and are seeking state and local government contracts. Small business certification with the South Central Texas Regional Certification Agency is in process. We hold no City of San Antonio contract.
No client, agency or sponsor funds, reviews or approves any of these tools, and nothing on these pages is a solicitation. Every figure comes from the public record named below, which is linked and can be queried without us.
Corrections. If a number here disagrees with the record, write to Justice Harker at [email protected] with the figure and the source that contradicts it. Corrections are made on the page, and what changed is noted there rather than replaced silently.
Source. This page reads the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office incident feed, published by Bexar County. This is a county record, not a City of San Antonio one, and it is not comparable with San Antonio Police figures. The record is linked from the page above and can be queried without us. We claim no rights over the underlying record and add no license of our own to it.