Police say Dallas’ crime plan is working
Dallas police and criminologists say the city’s violent-crime plan is working and point to the nearly 12 percent drop in “streetlevel” violence since its conception in May 2021.
Mike Smith and Rob Tillyer, University of Texas at San Antonio criminologists who helped develop the crime plan, told the city’s public safety committee this week the first year of the crime plan provided police with strategies about what works and what strategies should be honed moving forward.
The 11.5 percent drop compared “street violent crime” from May 2021 to May 2022 with the period May 2020 to May 2021 to evaluate the 12 months since the plan started.
Street-level violence does not include all types of violence; Smith defined it as murders, robberies, and aggravated assaults that aren’t domestic violence. The criminologists said the violent-crime plan was primarily designed to target street violence, not sexual assault and domestic violence. Dallas has a different plan for family violence.
“We’ve had challenges and we’ll continue to have challenges, but we’ll meet those head on,” Dallas police Chief Eddie Garca told the committee Monday. “Reinvesting in places and people is extremely important. When crime goes up, it’s not just a police issue. And when it goes down, it’s a collective effort.”
Overall violent crime from January 2022 to the present is also down, although by a smaller amount. Violent crime — including sexual assaults and domestic violence — is down about 4.25%, or 357 fewer offenses, compared with this point in 2021, but murders and robberies have seen a slight uptick, according to Dallas police statistics updated Monday.
Strategies to curb violence
The violent-crime plan involves short-, medium- and long-term strategies: hot-spot policing, or heightened police visibility in about 50 small 330foot-by-330-foot grids in Dallas; place-network investigations, which tries to disrupt criminal networks; and focused deterrence, which aims to change the behavior of high-risk offenders through arrests, community involvement and social services. Police haven’t yet launched focused deterrence.
The plan is based on the belief that a disproportionate amount of crime happens in small pockets of the city.
Hot-spot policing had a “pretty significant impact,” with a 10.7% drop in violence in the grids since May 2021 due to police efforts, Tillyer said. He said violence in the grids accounted for about 5% of overall violence citywide before treatment; after treatment, they accounted for between 2 to 3 percent of the city’s crime. And while arrests increased 6.4 percent citywide, he said there was only a 2.6 percent uptick in arrests in the hotspot grids.
There was also evidence of a sustained effect; Tillyer said data shows even after police moved on to a new set of grids, the ones previously chosen didn’t return to the same level of violence before the treatment.
For place-network investigations, police zeroed in on two pilot locations: 3550 East Overton, which is the Volara Apartments in east Oak Cliff, and 11700 Ferguson Road in Far East Dallas, which includes several apartment complexes and a strip shopping center. Since February, police and city departments such as code enforcement tried to address crime and conditions that give rise to it with detailed operations plan for each one, Smith said.
Police have seen different results. Violent crime dropped at 3550 East Overton and the location is no longer the most violent “hot spot” for the first time in years, Smith said. But at 11700 Ferguson Road, violence has climbed.
Smith said the team was too ambitious with the stretch of Ferguson Road, adding that it’s about 1.5 miles long and needs to be narrowed to “something more manageable.”
“There was a big learning curve here,” Smith said. “We labeled these as pilot locations I think for a reason, and we learned there’s a lot of lessons I think that DPD took out of this initial effort at these two locations.”
The criminologists also measured how compliant Dallas police officers were in the hot-spot grids and if they were at locations when they were supposed to be. Officer compliance rosefrom 62% at the outset to 89 percent in the most recent period, Tillyer said.
Police acknowledged challenges ahead, noting the uptick in murders year-to-date.