‘This is the Wild West’: Long police wait times in major cities leave victims feeling helpless

A brutal, random attack left a doctor unconscious and bleeding on sidewalk in Portland, Oregon. Three weeks later, police have no updates for her.

"This is the Wild West," Corey Judd told Fox News after his friend's attack.

Judd and Mary Costantino were walking in Southwest Portland when, out of nowhere, a metal water bottle was flung, striking Costantino in the face and knocking her unconscious. There was no warning. Surveillance video showed the attack happened in about three seconds, with a figure darting across the light rail tracks and hurling the bottle.

"What strikes me is just the randomness of this," said Judd, who lived in Portland in the early 2000s and was visiting from Spokane, Washington. "This was not a bad part of town. It's not a bad block. This is a very public place where you get on the train."

Judd and Costantino called 911, then waited 20 minutes for a police response before giving up and leaving the scene.

"We're left on our own to figure it out," he said. "My short time in Portland after that, it kind of made me think, I can't recall seeing a police car the entire weekend."

Costantino made it clear she doesn't fault police for not responding faster — she blames far-left city leaders and voters for chipping away at public safety.

"We don't have enough police force to protect our citizens," she previously told Fox News. "We did this to ourselves."

While Portland's violent crime rate remains low compared to many urban hubs, the Rose City has been flush with complaints about safety over the past few years, especially as police response times have skyrocketed.

In 2012, the earliest year the Portland Police Bureau shows on its website, the average high-priority response time was just over six minutes total. Most of that was travel time.

Now high-priority calls wait nearly 20 minutes on average. More than half of that delay is categorized as "time in queue" before an officer is dispatched.

The first time Costantino called Portland police went very differently. Around two decades ago when she was still a medical resident, someone smashed her car window, swiped her white coat and dropped it a few yards away. She said an officer immediately responded, filed a report and explained that the culprit was probably looking for drugs.

"I felt like they educated me and they filed a report and they had time," she said. "That was just a broken car window. I don't have that expectation that anybody has time to reach out to me now … I just assume that nobody will because the police force is inundated."... (Read more)

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