The City of Dallas launched a new interactive public data dashboard on Thursday that provides information on the use of force by the Dallas Police Department (DPD).
“In April 2022, Dallas Police began working with Police Strategies LLC., a vendor that provides data evaluation and analysis, to study Dallas Police use-of-force data and create the report and dashboards,” reads a post on DPD’s blog, The Beat.
The first published report looks back at seven years of data between 2014 and 2021, with a more in-depth analysis of 2021.
Users can isolate multiple variables on the dashboard to better understand some of the use-of-force dynamics at play in Dallas.
The data can be viewed in various ways, isolating for date and time, the justification for force, weapons used by either police or suspects, injuries sustained by either party, race, gender, and age, among others.
The city also set up a way for the public to view officer-involved shooting data.
In an emailed statement to The Dallas Express, DPD Assistant Director of Media Relations Kristin Lowman said, “Chief [Eddie] Garcia has highlighted what this report and data tell us, [that] is there is not a significant culture issue in regards to excessive force in this department and racial disparity.”
The report comes just a couple of months after an anti-police brutality protest was held at DPD headquarters in solidarity with demonstrators in Memphis, Tennessee.
The protest followed the release of bodycam footage that showed several Memphis police officers beating a suspect to death, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.
Some of the key findings from the Dallas report suggest that the type of crime involved in the police encounter determines whether the suspect resists or not, which in turn prompts officers’ corresponding use of force.
“Based on the data … subjects who are engaged in disorderly conduct or trespassing or are in violation of parole or probation are the most likely to resist arrest (about 15% of the time). Subjects who are involved with drug or property crimes and traffic offenses are the least likely to resist officers (less than 3% of the time),” the report notes.
The report also found that 85% of all use-of-force incidents contained circumstances under which officers had “no reasonable alternative than to use force,” such as when suspects are fleeing, initiating violence against police, making verbal or physical threats against police, or committing violence against a third party in the presence of police.
“In only 15% of all force incidents, none of the four factors were present. … These are the types of situations where deescalation techniques can be used most effectively,” reads the report.
In looking at racial disparities in DPD’s use of force, the report found that different sample benchmarks yielded different outcomes.
For instance, taking the whole population of Dallas as a base dataset would make it seem that police were way more likely to use force against African-American suspects. However, when surveying from a base population of total arrestees, the report suggests something entirely different.
“Compared to White arrestees, Asian arrestees were 10% less likely to have force used against them, Black arrestees were 20% less likely, and Hispanic arrestees were 30% less likely. Native American arrestees were 50% more likely than White arrestees to have force used against them,” reads the report.
The report further claimed:
“While Black individuals are overrepresented in reported crime suspects, Black suspects are 10% less likely to be arrested by Dallas PD officers than would be expected. This statistic suggests a lack of widespread racial bias against Black individuals among Dallas PD officers as well as the absence of systemic bias within the Dallas Police Department.”
The new dashboards and reports come when murders are up by a significant margin year-to-date. According to a report by DPD, murders are up almost 30% as of Saturday, April 1. A total of 75 people have been killed in Dallas so far this year.
