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COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO. -- With all the cuts to the city's budget how many police officer are left to respond to calls?

FOX21 News looked at the number of cops on the street.

The Colorado Springs Police Department (CSPD) is facing dwindling funds and fewer officers.

Twenty-three percent of the time when a person in Colorado Springs calls 911 there isn’t an officer to respond. It's just part of the way Springs police are doing business with a smaller budget and a shrinking force.

It starts at the 911 Dispatch Center at the Police Operations Center. If a person needs immediate help from police it’s where the call first comes in.

But will there be an officer to help?

"When you call the police, 23 percent of the time there is not an officer that is available and free to send to your call," said Sgt. Steve Noblitt of CSPD.

A frightening thought. With a person's life or the life of a loved one on the line there may be no one who can help.

So what do police do when this happens?

"We have to either try and free up those officers by asking them to clear from a call for service or the call has to hold until we have an officer available to send,"  Noblitt said.

This is the new normal for Colorado Springs Police.

The national average for a city of this size is a police force of 800. CSPD force has just 647 officers.

That about 1.5 officers for every 1000 people who live in the area.

Police didn’t want reveal to criminals just how bad the situation is. But they say, depending on the day and the shift, there are anywhere between 39 and 119 patrol officers on the streets to answer calls.

That’s to cover every square inch of the eighth-largest metro area in the country in terms of square miles.

"Our resources have fallen to the point where we really have to keep our officers available to respond to the violent crime in progress," Noblitt said.

But that leaves a lot of other crime to fall by the wayside.

Property crime detectives on the force have dropped from 25 to 12 and some calls police simply can’t respond to anymore -- like car break-ins, loud music or barking dogs.

"You notice it when you call and your car has been broken into and we tell you we don’t send officers to that call because there is no suspect information," Noblitt said.

And prevention and community policing are almost non-existent.

FOX 21 News recently followed police as they checked for underage drinkers at a night club. But officers told reporters they didn’t have the time to stay as long as they would have liked so they passed it along to the Vice Unit.

"Our ability to do education in the community, our ability to do prevention in the community is reduced because we are pulling officers out of that area and putting them in a patrol car and in a uniform and asking them to respond to calls for service," Noblitt said.

The worry is the public will stop reporting non-violent crime.

But police say it’s even more important than ever to make a report online or at the substation even if an officer can’t come to a person's home. It helps overworked officers track crime trends.

And they say the public should always call 911 if someone sees a crime in progress.

"We are not saying that crimes in progress we are not going to respond to.  If we see a crime in progress, if a person reports a crime in progress we're going," Noblitt said.

Because the Colorado Sproings city budget is so heavily reliant on sales tax revenues, if the economy doesn’t turn around soon police say they will have to make even deeper cuts.