Department baseline
Before judging reform, look at what Police and Fire were actually doing.
Thesis: public-safety policy should be read beside department performance. During years of direct Council oversight, repeated policy review and changes in the City’s response model, Culver City’s official records document fast police response, low use-of-force incidence, extensive de-escalation/anti-bias/crisis-intervention training, and a highly rated fire department. These numbers do not decide the policy debate, but they establish the operational baseline being debated.
Culver City Police Department
3:40average emergency response time reported in 2024
48,311calls for service in 2024
1132024 use-of-force incidents
02024 incidents in CCPD’s lethal-force category
CCPD’s 2024 force report classified 112 of 113 use-of-force incidents as limited force and one as less-lethal. The City said the department’s 3:40 average emergency response time was among the fastest reported by police agencies in Los Angeles County.
Resident-level meaning: this is the existing emergency-response baseline against which any future change in 911 dispatch, co-response or after-hours coverage can be compared.
Training already included reform-era practices
CCPD’s published training disclosures include de-escalation and tactical communication, procedural justice, implicit-bias and racial-profiling instruction, crisis intervention, scenario training, and related arrest-and-control training.
De-escalationProcedural justiceImplicit biasRacial profilingCrisis interventionScenario training
A precise alternative to politically loaded shorthand is: procedural-justice, anti-bias, de-escalation and crisis-intervention training.
Culver City Fire Department
Class 1ISO Public Protection Classification
498Class 1 agencies among 38,000+ surveyed nationally in 2023
20personnel assigned to each shift
~75%uniformed staff certified as paramedics
CCFD says it has maintained ISO Class 1 since 1995 and is CFAI-accredited. Its emergency-services page lists three engine companies, one ladder truck, three paramedic rescue units and a battalion-chief vehicle, with 20 personnel assigned per shift.
CCFD publishes response performance by risk category and response component at the 90th percentile; those distinct measures are not equivalent to a single “average Fire response time.”