Over the last several months, The Dallas Express has tried to obtain crime data from the Dallas Police Department, but requests have lingered as the city fails to hand over this public information.
The Dallas Express requested the information to better understand crime in Dallas, which per capita, has a higher crime rate than Philadelphia and New York City, according to some sources.
The insight into the department bureaucracy began on July 5, The Dallas Express filed a Freedom of Information request stating that the department’s Crime Analytic Overview and the City’s Opendata portal do not match.
The Dallas Crime Analytics Overview shows the number of crimes by month in the city of Dallas. The Opendata portal lists the number of incidents by day in the city.
The information request asked three things: to advise which dataset is the correct count of crime in the City of Dallas by day/month/year, define incident and crime as used by the City of Dallas’s two databases, and access to the data file that the Dallas Crime Analytics Overview was built off of.
A day later, the city informed the paper that the request was redirected to the Dallas PD’s Open Records Unit, where the request is stalled.
The Dallas Express had followed up via email seven times asking for a response.
On August 4, The Dallas Express physically went to the DPD’s Record Unit, only to be told the request was “in the reaction queue to make sure there is not sensitive information that could be released.”
Additionally, the paper was informed there are roughly 4,000 open records requests with only a handful of officers to review. When asked for an estimated date the request would be fulfilled, the paper was told, “I don’t know,” by an officer.
A few days later, The Dallas Express received a semi-response stating, “It appears this request was forwarded to the wrong department. The Dallas Police Department Open Records Unit does not possess this information and had informed me to forward this request to the Office of Data Analytics and Business Intelligence.”
When The Dallas Express called the DPD Friday afternoon, the person answering the phone said they had never heard of the Office of Data Analytics and Business Intelligence.
