It has now been two months since the City of Dallas claimed a ransomware attack hit its servers, limiting the functionality of some of its computer-related operations, and reliable crime statistics are still not being made available to the public.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, City Manager T.C. Broadnax has been unable to return full functionality to the City of Dallas Open Data crime analytics dashboard, despite restoring online library services and other department systems unrelated to public safety.
While it appears that City staff — in partnership with the Dallas Police Department (DPD) — have managed to upload a significant backlog of reported crimes, certain filters on the dashboard do not allow users to know where crimes have occurred.
The Dallas Express reached out to DPD and asked whether the crime statistics could be relied upon and what the status was of the City’s efforts to resolve the lingering issues.
Kristin Lowman, assistant director of media relations for DPD, said questions about what the City is doing to get the dashboard back up and running would best be answered by the City. As for the veracity of the published statistics, Lowman said, “The numbers should still not be used for reporting.”
The Dallas Express reached out to the City and asked for an update on its efforts to resolve the remaining issues with the crime data. No response was received by press time.
The lack of reliable publicly-available crime statistics comes at a time when Dallas has been reeling from significant spikes in murders and auto thefts. According to the latest verified DPD report, which only runs through May 1, there was a 23% increase in murders compared to the first four months of 2023. Auto thefts also jumped by 17%.
A significant police shortage (400-500) has also been plaguing the city, resulting in DPD adopting a new online reporting protocol — which began on Monday — for certain “non-emergency” crimes.
Crime in Downtown Dallas has been especially rampant, regularly logging several times more incidents than Fort Worth’s downtown area, which is patrolled by private security guards and a dedicated police unit — similar to the one currently operating in Deep Ellum.
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.
