Gunfire broke out in the early morning hours on Saturday, resulting in five people getting shot and a police officer sustaining injuries.
A shooting call came into the Dallas Police Department around 4:30 a.m. Officers responded to a Texaco gas station in the 100 block of W. Laureland Road just off I-35 frontage road in Council Member Zarin Gracey’s District 3.
“The preliminary investigation determined when officers arrived five people had been shot outside a business. The five people were taken to a local hospital, one in critical condition,” DPD said in an email to The Dallas Express.
An officer was also injured at the scene and transported for medical treatment at a hospital. While DPD noted that the officer had sustained a non-life-threatening injury, the department did not elaborate on how the officer became injured or what the condition of the other four civilians who were shot.
The investigation is ongoing.
There have been 122 murders and 3,401 aggravated assaults logged citywide in Dallas proper this year as of July 26, according to the City’s crime analytics dashboard.
Zooming in on District 3, the data shows that 10 of the murders and 213 of the aggravated assaults were committed in the jurisdiction. Additionally, the council district has seen 583 simple assaults, 181 reports of intimidation, and 89 documented weapon law violations.
The Dallas Police Department has been dealing with staffing issues for several years, which have dampened its efforts to fight crime. Only around 3,000 sworn officers are currently in the field, despite a prior City analysis recommending a force of roughly 4,000 based on the city’s population.
For its part, the Dallas City Council signed off on a budget of only $654 million for DPD this fiscal year, considerably less taxpayer money spent on public safety than in other high-crime jurisdictions, such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.