Ask a Chicagoan and you’ll hear that ambulances don’t always arrive quickly when someone is shot. People have died while waiting. As a result, many gunshot victims are getting rides from friends or driving themselves to a nearby hospital, forgoing transportation in an ambulance for a chance to reach an emergency room on time, The Trace reports. But the Chicago Fire Department is failing to track its response times, even though Chicago’s Office of the Inspector General has called for the Fire Department to improve its data collection every year since 2021. Still, a Trace analysis found that between Jan. 2021 and Nov. 2024, the rate of incidents with response times longer than six minutes grew by 4.6 percentage points. The analysis looked at accidents, seizures, and shootings and found that, in more than one in five cases, Chicago EMS response was longer than six minutes – the state’s threshold for adequate response time. But the analysis also found that data was missing in more than 43,000 incidents.
The problem: when a survivor leaves a scene before an ambulance arrives, they’re not counted in CFD’s records, so it’s hard to say how many gunshot victims fall into that group. The Inspector General’s office has emphasized since 2013 that CFD failed to accurately document the data necessary to assess whether it’s meeting the six-minute standard for EMS response times. Among its recommendations is that the CFD conduct a geographic analysis, by ward or community, that identifies areas where ambulances aren’t meeting their response time goals. Answers to that come through the Trace’s analysis of gunshot incidents between 2021 and November 2024 showed that areas on the South Side were among the most affected by slow response times. Last year, Ward 9, which includes Chatham, Roseland, Pullman, Washington Heights, West Pullman, and Riverdale, had the highest number of gunshot-related calls to which it took more than six minutes for an ambulance to arrive. During the same time frame, one in five calls in that area had slow response times.