Racial minorities continue to suffer the brunt of Dallas’ rising murder rate despite efforts by the Dallas Police Department to suppress violent crime.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, DPD has taken a data-driven hotspot policing approach to getting violent crime under control. While the plan has seemingly resulted in significant declines in certain categories of violent crime, murders have continued to tick upward.
According to the City of Dallas crime analytics dashboard, there have been 239 criminal homicides committed this year as of December 22, a 13.8% increase over the number of incidents clocked during the same period in 2022.
Of the year’s murder victims so far, 132 were black (55.2%), and 78 were Hispanic or Latino (32.6%). The overwhelming majority of victims were male, some 174 in total.
Local anti-violence activist Antong Lucky suggested earlier in the year that part of the problem could be a lack of trust between law enforcement and particular neighborhoods in Dallas.
“Communities of color feel as though there is a blue wall of silence, that there is no accountability of police, that officers sit out and watch their colleagues do heinous stuff. And then you have officers saying to the community, ‘Hey, when something heinous happened, you didn’t tell us who did it.’ That’s a real thing, whether we accept it or not,” Lucky told The Dallas Express in a previous interview.
Additionally, an ongoing staff shortage has dampened DPD’s efforts at getting the murder rate down. It only has around 3,000 officers in the field despite a City analysis calling for closer to 4,000. Downtown Dallas has been affected by the shortage, logging significantly higher crime rates than Fort Worth’s city center, which is patrolled by a specialized neighborhood police unit and private security guards.
