Verified public-facing crime statistics are still not being made available to the citizens of Dallas, more than two months after an alleged ransomware attack on City computer servers.
However, according to the Dallas Police Department, internal accounting of criminal activity in the city still sheds some light on the troubling picture of Dallas crime, despite City Manager T.C. Broadnax’s failure to bring all public safety systems back online.
Kristin Lowman, assistant director of media relations for DPD, informed The Dallas Express that 142 murders have been committed year-to-date within Dallas city limits, marking an 8.4% increase over 2022.
The figure provided by Lowman appears to match up with data displayed on the City of Dallas Open Data crime analytics dashboard. However, critical features on the website are inoperable, making it unclear where criminal homicides have occurred in Dallas after May 3 — the date of the purported cyberattack.
Police Chief Eddie Garcia previously told The Dallas Express that the department’s efforts at suppressing violent crime have been undermined by a lack of up-to-date geographic crime data, which the department had been using to inform its hotspot-based Violent Crime Reduction Plan.
It is currently unclear whether that dynamic has changed in light of DPD’s internal logging of criminal incidents.
The department has also been handicapped by a staffing shortage of roughly 900 officers, according to a City document advising that Dallas should have roughly three police officers for every 1,000 residents.
The Dallas Express reached out to the City for an update on its efforts to make accurate crime statistics available to the public again, but no response was received by press time.
Lingering technical issues with the City’s crime data continue to play out against the backdrop of rampant crime in Downtown Dallas, which logs considerably more crime than Fort Worth’s downtown, where a dedicated police unit operates alongside private security guards.
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.