An apparent vagrant was reportedly caught masturbating in public near Dallas City Hall last week, according to an eyewitness.
Mark Nunneley, the Chief Accounting Officer for a local publicly traded company, told The Dallas Express that he and three other people witnessed the incident last Thursday.
He said the alleged crime was committed downtown between Pioneer Park Cemetery and Dallas City Hall — on a grassy hill in full view of the public.
“As we were driving by there on the way to City Hall,” he explained, “one of us turned around and … I go, ‘Did I really just see that?’ and we all turned around and everyone in the car saw — there was a gentleman laying back on the grassy knoll masturbating.”
Red star marks the reported location of the incident
“We were on Marilla [Street] when we saw it,” he said.
Nunneley told The Dallas Express that this man made no attempt to conceal his actions. He noted that public behavior like this could determine how visitors view Dallas.
“It doesn’t bode very well for our city,” he said. “It doesn’t come across very good for people that see this.”
He added that a group of about 20 “high school or college kids” were right around the corner.
“They very likely could have seen him as well. He wasn’t trying to hide himself. He wasn’t in the corner,” Nunneley continued. “Right there in front of us and God and everybody. It was pretty disturbing.”
Nunneley lamented “the whole idea that someone could be doing this downtown” so close to City Hall and “no one’s around to even stop it.”
However, Dallas Police Department (DPD) spokesperson Kristin Lowman told The Dallas Express that the department has no “record of a call reporting this incident” to police.
“If a call was made — DPD would have responded to the report location and investigated appropriately,” according to Lowman.
Despite the City spending millions of taxpayer dollars every year on homelessness and vagrancy initiatives, the crisis continues, especially downtown.
Polling from Downtown Dallas Inc. found that more than 75% of downtown residents continue to believe that “homelessness is a significant issue.”
A recent survey by The Dallas Express found that more than half of likely Dallas voters view homelessness and vagrancy as serious problems.
One potential solution favored by the majority of Dallas residents in another recent survey is the one-stop-shop model of San Antonio’s Haven for Hope, which provides homeless services in a confined geographic area.
Council Member Cara Mendelsohn recently called attention to the City’s failure to clean up homeless and vagrant encampments.
City staff are “not doing the enforcement that’s necessary,” leaving her District 12 constituents “extremely frustrated,” Mendelsohn claimed.
The Dallas Express reached out to the City’s Office of Homeless Solutions to ask what is being done to prevent such public incidents and to Mayor Eric Johnson’s office to ask about the effect of such incidents on families downtown. No responses were received by the publication deadline.