CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – As Albemarle County’s population and number of businesses continue to grow, so too does the challenge of responding quickly to calls for help to the police, particularly in the rural areas.

Response times for the ACPD vary drastically from urban areas to more rural parts of the county, an issue county officials said they are studying.

According to the department’s midyear crime report, officers are exceeding their goal of responding to calls in urban areas, but struggling with response time for calls in rural areas.

“The rural part of the county is such a large part, and with it comes geographic challenges,” ACPD chief Col. Sean Reeves told Cville Right Now. “It comes down to the growth of Albemarle County, the Albemarle County Police Department has not been able to effectively keep up with the large amount of growth. We need to have additional resources to respond to calls for service.”

Reeves’s department has specific goals for response times. It aims to have an officer on the scene in under five minutes from when it receives a call in urban areas, where most of the population they serve resides and, subsequently, where much of the crime occurs.

The goal is under 10 minutes in the rural areas of the county, where distance and road conditions complicate responding.

Through the first six months of this year, ACPD responded to 341 calls it labeled Priority 1, the category that includes violent crimes and motor vehicle crashes with injuries. The average response time was 4:33, under the target time. It hit or bettered its goal on 73% of those calls.

“That is a good response time, but I often look at things from the perspective of the community,” Reeves said. “That four-and-a-half minutes, that five minutes, if you’re involved in some sort of incident that’s a threat to your life, that five minutes can feel like an eternity.”

That time is more than doubled, however, in rural areas.

The ACPD responded to 102 Priority 1 calls in the rural part of the county and posted an average response time 11:02. It hit or beat its 10-minute goal on just 54% of those calls.

“It’s distance, but it’s also the roads,” Albemarle County Board of Supervisors member Bea LaPisto Kirtley told Cville Right Now. “Charlottesville is a very, very old community and our roads are frankly made up of old horse trails, cow trails and we just followed along. It’s not built in the rural areas for an urban setting. It’s built along these windy, narrow, up and down roads that limit the response time.”

LaPisto-Kirtley said county residents value their emergency responders. She said when the board raised the tax rate by four cents, constituents appreciated that 3.2 cents were directed toward fire and police services.

“I didn’t get any pushback,” she said. “People were supportive of that. I think our community realizes with 726 square miles to patrol, not only for police but fire also, you need to have officers, fire and police, to be able to respond all over our county.”

In its most recent adopted budget, the Board of Supervisors approved the addition of six new officers, plus two new school resource officers, bringing Reeves’s force up to 171. Three officers and the two SROs started on July 1. Another three officers will be added to the rolls as of Jan. 1, 2026.

The county has also commissioned a third-party study of its emergency response staffing and how it deploys its personnel and resources.

“We are undertaking a public safety comprehensive staffing study that will assess our police and fire rescue departments to ensure we are most effectively providing public safety response,” county spokesperson Abbey Stumpf told Cville Right Now. “The study will review industry standards and best practices and will make recommendations for infrastructure/deployment and staffing that will address the changing risk profile of the County as it continues to grow and change year to year.​”

Reeves said even the best deployment strategies in the rural areas can be disrupted by urban calls that require additional manpower.

“It’s almost like a domino effect,” Reeves said. “We have officers in the different sectors of the county. However, some of the Priority 1 calls or your more serious calls take two officers to respond and we’re often finding ourselves having to pull from the south side, the west side, the far east side of the county to respond to those calls. When there’s an emergency that comes up in other parts of the county, it extends that response time out.”

For Reeves, part of the challenge of managing response times is striking a balance between wanting to get to citizens in distress as fast as possible, and wanting to assure his officers’ safety.

“We want our officers to get there safely but we also want them to get there in a timely manner, as well,” he said.