Harvard alumnus Mayor Eric Johnson recently marked his 25th college reunion in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by speaking on a panel about his approach to crime and policing in the city of Dallas.
The panel organized earlier this month at Harvard University, moderated by fellow alumna Kristen Welker of NBC News, was entitled “Race and Opportunity in America.”
In the discussion, Johnson highlighted Dallas’ decision to maintain funding for law enforcement and the rejection of calls to defund the city’s police.
“During my time as Mayor, during my first term, the defund the police issue emerged after George Floyd’s killing specifically and that was a policy thing,” the mayor told the panel.
As The Dallas Express reported, Johnson’s support of the Dallas Police Department (DPD) during this critical period was a pillar of his reelection campaign.
On the panel, Johnson continued to recount the crime wave of the early 1990s that gripped major cities, including Dallas. He said that Dallas’ murder trends in 2020 reminded him of that era.
“It legitimately scared me to death when I was seeing the numbers [of murders] going in the direction that they were going, to think that we could go anywhere near the numbers of those days,” Johnson said.
He continued to outline what he called a “both-and” approach to preventing violent crime which rejects a supposed dichotomy between the police and the community.
“I took the position that we needed a ‘both-and’ approach to our public safety problem,” Johnson said. “It’s not that we need to arbitrarily, without any real study just say wack the police department by 33%.”
Addressing the panel, he argued that Dallas not only needs law enforcement but also must expand its services “in the areas of mental health and [do] a lot more in terms of violence interruption programs.”
Johnson also said he took flak for not embracing the defund the police movement but credited his “both-and” approach for a drop in violent crime in the years since Floyd’s death.
“I said trust me on this. We’re going to do it all. What happened in Dallas, Texas — you can look it up — was the only top ten city in the United States of America that saw its violent crime, in every category tracked by the FBI, fall in 2021 and 2022,” Johnson said.
“Now we’re in year three and violent crime is falling again,” he asserted.
Johnson said he cut a middle road between activists from both sides of the policing debate.
“I wouldn’t let the back-the-blue crowd tell me it’s all about hiring more officers. It’s about that in part, but it’s also about these other things. We did all, and it’s actually working,” he claimed.
While it is true that Dallas has maintained a lower violent crime rate than some major cities, sharply rising homicides in 2023 threaten to derail the mayor’s reduction efforts.
Per the most recent publicly available data from DPD, the city logged a 33.85% increase in non-family violence homicides in the first third of 2023.
Up-to-date crime data remain unavailable due to the City’s ongoing failure to resolve problems stemming from an alleged ransomware attack in early May, as The Dallas Express has reported.
Moreover, DPD has a shortage of police officers, Chief Eddie Garcia told The Dallas Express in a recent interview.
“We need hundreds of more officers in the city of Dallas. There’s no question about it. You know, not only is the recruiting portion important, but the retention part as well,” Garcia explained.
The Dallas Express reached out to Mayor Johnson’s office and DPD for additional comment on the mayor’s Harvard remarks but received no response from either by the publication deadline.
