A St. Louis woman says an intruder tried to force his way back into her Dogtown home around 1 a.m. on Nov. 1 — about 25 minutes after she first dialed 911 — and police didn't arrive until 1:45 a.m. Her experience was one of several that St. Louis residents say exposed how badly the city's emergency response system buckled on Halloween night.
Jennifer Kelley first called 911 at 12:32 a.m. on Nov. 1, according to police records cited by FOX 2. She had just encountered an intruder in her bedroom in Dogtown and managed to persuade him to leave. Kelley told the station she initially hesitated to call 911 at all because she'd heard it was difficult to get through.
When the man tried to re-enter her home roughly 25 minutes later, Kelley called 911 again. The Saint Louis Metropolitan Police Department told FOX 2 that no district cars were immediately available for her because officers were tied up on other calls, though a police supervisor was notified about her situation. Officers were ultimately dispatched at 1:30 a.m. and arrived at 1:45 a.m., where they took an intoxicated man into custody at a facility. Kelley said the ordeal left her afraid that police might not show up at all if she ever needed them again.
Gunfire, a Hang-Up, and an Alarm Company Picking Up the Phone
Kelley wasn't the only resident describing a rough night. In the Central West End, Alex Ward said he called 911 during gunfire outside his home and waited on hold for about seven minutes before hanging up. SLMPD told FOX 2 that Ward had actually called a non-emergency line, but Ward disputed that account and provided a call-log screenshot showing he had dialed 911. The department has said non-emergency calls stay queued until an operator becomes available, and that callers who hang up and call back lose their place in line — guidance that mirrors what SLMPD posts for all 911 callers.
Carrie Zukoski also called 911 during the same burst of gunfire. She told FOX 2 her call was eventually answered after about 40 minutes — but by an employee at an alarm dispatch company, not an emergency dispatcher. SLMPD said it had no information explaining how the alarm company ended up answering her call.
A Call Center Overwhelmed Into Sunday Morning
Police told FOX 2 that the department's 911 call center was overwhelmed with calls from Halloween night into Sunday morning, and that some calls were rolled over to St. Louis County police dispatch as a result. The department also said that rollover process makes it harder to trace exactly where some calls ended up. SLMPD's own guidance notes that its call center is the city's primary 911 answering point and fields more than 800,000 calls per year, with a stated goal of answering every call within 10 seconds — though the department acknowledges that high volume can push wait times longer. That same guidance tells residents to call 911 if there's an intruder in their home or business, or even if they merely suspect one might be inside.
SLMPD said it has focused on increasing officer staffing to meet patrol needs, pointing to multiple hiring initiatives, including fast-track testing opportunities, and says it continues to incorporate newer technology into its operations.
A Pattern Playing Out Citywide
The Halloween night complaints echo broader numbers that have circulated around the city's emergency response system. As recently as July 2023, St. Louis was answering fewer than 60% of 911 calls within 10 seconds — well below the national standard of 90% — before improving to more than 80%, largely due to increased staffing, according to St. Louis Public Radio. More recently, the station reported that St. Louis answered just 78% of its 2025 calls within the 15-second benchmark suggested by the National Emergency Number Association — the same rate as Chicago, while Kansas City answered only 56% within that window.
A Forward Through Ferguson analysis of more than 1.3 million 911 calls from 2017 to 2019 found an average response time of 15 minutes across the region, with higher-priority calls averaging 5 minutes and lower-priority calls, like traffic accidents, averaging 23 minutes, per the same St. Louis Public Radio report. A separate July 2026 report found that SLMPD response times for lower-priority calls had more than doubled over the past decade. Other residents have described similarly long waits: Casey Crocker told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch he waited nearly two hours for officers to respond to a disturbance at his Benton Park home, while Ellen Gordon said officers reached her 20 to 25 minutes after she called about a protection-order violation.
Consolidated Dispatch Center Still Years Away
City officials have pointed to a planned consolidated 911 dispatch center as a long-term fix, though its timeline has slipped repeatedly. A 2024 report had projected completion in 2026, but a September report from St. Louis Public Radio said construction was now on track to conclude in late fall 2027, with the center opening sometime after that. The $45 million, 17,000-square-foot facility is meant to house all of the city's emergency dispatch services under one roof, according to First Alert 4, with room for 44 workstations compared with 35 spread across the two dispatch locations currently in use.
Even so, a Forward Through Ferguson report cited by First Alert 4 cautioned that a centralized dispatch center wouldn't necessarily fix communication problems between the city, St. Louis County, and municipalities within the county, since each maintains its own separate dispatch center. The same report noted that calls exceeding the county police department's queue capacity already roll over to the city's dispatch center — a pattern similar to what SLMPD described happening on Halloween night. St. Louis County police have separately said it took one caller 14 minutes to get through to county dispatch during a 2023 storm, underscoring that delays have cropped up on both sides of the city-county line.
