While many of the City of Dallas’ public-facing crime statistic dashboards are back up and running, City Manager T.C. Broadnax and his IT department have not fully restored critical geographic data that allow residents to see where crime is happening in their city.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, officials claimed that the alleged attack prevented it from updating its statistics after May 3. For weeks, the City’s crime data were essentially frozen, as officers with the Dallas Police Department initially took to pen and paper to keep a record of criminal incidents.
The department and City staff then began slowly clearing the backlog. Over time, the City of Dallas Open Data crime analytics dashboard — which allows users to filter the data by criteria including crime category, jurisdiction, and time period — began to display statistics for incidents that occurred after May 3.
More recently, the City managed to restore DPD’s daily Compstat briefing, a PDF document that provides a running tally of incidents within major crime categories. The Dallas Express cross-referenced the figures between the briefing and the dashboard, and the two appear to be relatively in sync. Still, the former only notes how many crimes have been committed within the various DPD divisions. The latter has no functioning filters for geography, leaving users unable to see where crimes are being committed.
It is currently unclear whether the ongoing lack of granular geographic data is impacting DPD’s ability to implement its Violent Crime Reduction Plan. As previously reported by The Dallas Express, Police Chief Eddie Garcia said back in May that the lack of reliable and up-to-date crime data had forced the department to rely on old statistics to inform its hotspot-based crime intervention initiative.
“The criminologists are waiting for the data so we can start working on the next grids — because we switch every 60 days — and so now we’re operating more from a historic perspective … going into the summer,” Garcia told The Dallas Express. “We’re getting some information, but it’s hampered our ability to really be data-driven, so we’re very much anxious to get back online.”
In addition to disrupting police operations — which already suffer from a staffing shortage of roughly 900 officers per a City analysis — Broadnax’s failure to resolve lingering issues from the purported ransomware attack continues to prevent Dallas residents from getting an accurate picture of the public safety situation in their city.
The shortage has been especially felt downtown, where far more crime is logged than in Fort Worth’s downtown area, which has a dedicated police unit working alongside private security guards.
According to the most recently available Compstat report, there have been 153 murders in 2023 as of August 5, marking a 6.25% increase year over year. Additionally, motor vehicle thefts are up by 34.5%, and shoplifting is up by 52.7%.
The Dallas Express, The People’s Paper, believes that important information about the city, such as crime rates and trends, should be easily accessible to you. Dallas has more crime per capita than hotspots like Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York, according to data from the FBI’s UCR database.
Curious to know how your area stacked up on crime? Normally, you could check out our interactive Crime Map to compare all Dallas City Council Districts, but as reliable data remain unavailable, this feature remains blank. Those interested in how we got our numbers previous to the ransomware hurdles can check out our methodology page here.