Criminal activity in Council Member Chad West’s District 1 accelerated in late January before beginning to taper off in recent days.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, West was named Crime Boss of the Month for the second month in a row this year for the steep year-over-year Crime Score increases District 1 logged based on crime data from December 2023 and January 2024.
According to the City of Dallas crime analytics dashboard, crimes were being reported at about the same rate as last year until January 26, when spikes in motor vehicle theft, car burglaries, and vandalism drove a significant upward trend that has only recently slowed down. Even still, crime is up year over year by 5.7%, with 704 total incidents this year as of February 13.
These crimes include 161 auto thefts, 91 simple assaults, 89 thefts from motor vehicles, 73 instances of vandalism, 48 drug violations, 46 burglaries, 35 aggravated assaults, 16 weapon law violations, and 14 robberies, among others.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, the Dallas Police Department has been struggling to get crime under control amid a longstanding officer shortage. The department currently only has around 3,000 officers on the street, despite a City analysis advising that roughly 4,000 are necessary to get police response times down and properly maintain public safety.
The effects of the shortage have been apparent in Downtown Dallas, which District 1 borders. The neighborhood regularly logs far more criminal activity than Fort Worth’s city center. A dedicated special police unit and private security guards patrol the latter.
District 1 is located just southwest of Historic Downtown between I-30 and Illinois Avenue and includes some of the neighborhoods east of Cockrell Hill and west of I-35. The City’s crime dashboard, however, showcases a crime heat map, which indicates that a lot of the crime is happening in the parts of District 1 that are closer to Downtown Dallas.
Budgeting only $654 million for DPD this fiscal year, City officials are set to spend much less taxpayer money on public safety than other high-crime cities, like New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The City’s budget was adopted in spite of DPD’s officer shortage.
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.
How did your area stack up on crime? Check out our interactive Crime Map to compare all Dallas City Council Districts. Curious how we got our numbers? Check out our methodology page here.