Dallas Police Department daily crime reports are back online for the first time since the alleged ransomware attack, showing increases in murders and auto thefts.
The Daily Crime Compstat report, which provides up-to-date information on crime in Dallas, was unavailable for almost three months. As The Dallas Express has covered extensively, City Manager T.C. Broadnax failed to restore publicly available crime data for roughly twelve weeks following an alleged ransomware attack on City servers on May 3, even long after other functions had gone live again.
A daily report has now been made available to the public for the first time since early May. However, the Dallas Police Department’s crime dashboards have yet to be restored to full functionality.
“The compstat report/daily admin report is up and running,” DPD spokesperson Kristin Lowman told The Dallas Express. “The dashboards continue to be rebuilt.”
“I think we’re all happy to see those reports,” said City Council Member Cara Mendelsohn, per NBC 5 DFW.
The numbers provided by the Daily Crime Compstat report show that auto thefts are up 33%, with more than 10,000 reported year-to-date.
The report also shows that homicide is up 10% year-over-year, with 150 murders so far in 2023.
“Simply put, crime is not on the decline,” Adekoye Adams of Dallas Justice Now said in a previous statement to The Dallas Express.
City officials are highlighting, however, that the rate of increase in murders has slowed since the data blackout in May, when reports of the crime were up by an even steeper 23.38%.
“Not only are we reducing the number of violent incidents that are happening in our city, it’s happening in the summer when violent crime is normally trending … upward,” Lowman claimed to NBC 5.
Council Member Mendelsohn noted, “We still have a lot of shootings so even though those numbers are down, they need to go down further.”
Meanwhile, the DPD is facing a shortage of roughly 900 police officers. A City analysis previously recommended about three officers for every 1,000 residents, putting the target staffing level for Dallas at approximately 4,000 officers.
The department currently employs about 3,100 officers.
Furthermore, crime rates in Downtown Dallas are notably higher compared to Fort Worth’s downtown, which is patrolled by a dedicated police unit in tandem with private security.