Welcome to The Dallas Express’ inaugural “Crime Boss of the Month.” At The Dallas Express, The People’s Paper, we believe that you should have easy access to important information, like crime rates and trends throughout the city. Applying our methodology to data from the FBI’s UCR database, Dallas has more crime per capita than hotbeds including Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York.
That is why every month the Dallas City Council Member with the greatest percentage increase (or smallest decrease) in crime in their district is named the Dallas “Crime Boss of the Month.”
We assigned a certain value to crimes based on their severity to calculate a cumulative weighted total for each city council district in Dallas. After accounting for population differences, we then compare this per capita “Crime Score” from a particular month with the score for the same month in the previous year to calculate the percentage change. Data on crimes reported during the previous month will be used to rank the districts and name the current Crime Boss of the Month.
The Crime Boss of the Month for November 2021 is Jaynie Schultz, Council Member for District 11.
She has served and sat on numerous committees and boards, and is President of the Schultz Family Foundation. Schultz has a B.A. in Government from the University of Texas in Austin and an M.A. in Urban Studies from the University of Texas at Arlington.
Under Schultz’s authority, District 11’s per capita Dallas Express Crime Score jumped from 186 in October of 2020 to 214 in October of 2021, an increase of a whopping 15%.
Among the crimes that saw the greatest spike was motor vehicle theft (worth 40 points), rocketing from 112 incidents in October 2020 to 157 in 2021.
The second-largest jump was in occurrences of destruction, damage, or vandalism of property (worth 30 points), with 69 instances this year in October compared to last year’s 50. District 11 also saw 9 more larceny and theft offenses, from 187 to 196, the third-most of all Dallas’s districts.
Schultz’s district has a population of 93,975, nearly 13,000 less than Dallas’ most populous (District 14, at 106,927). Despite ranking only eighth of fourteen in population, District 11 showed a steeper increase in crime rate than the seven more densely populated districts.
The district’s 15% increase is a full 3 percentage points – or 25% – greater than the next-closest region, which was District 14 with a 12% year-over-year increase.
We reached out to Schultz with questions about what she plans to do about the crime surge in her district. Schultz declined to comment.
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.