Business robberies are up in Dallas by more than 60%.
During a Monday meeting of the Public Safety Committee, the Dallas Police Department shared that while violent crime overall is down year over year, business robberies are up by roughly 64%.
“About 41% of those offenses start off as theft shoplifts in which somebody went into a retail store, tried to take items without paying for them, and then at some part of the incident, a store employee tried to stop them or intervene and got assaulted,” explained Maj. Jason Scoggins.
He claimed the other 59% of business robberies were perpetrated by “three different groups of serial robbers that have been hitting different parts of Dallas.”
“It’s not a bunch of people going out and robbing stores at gunpoint. … It’s actually a small group of a few people going out and robbing some of these [businesses] at gunpoint,” said Scoggins.
DPD said the increase included 41 total offenses, 16 more than the year prior.
However, Council Member Cara Mendelsohn (District 12), chair of the Public Safety Committee, said more attention needs to be paid to the overall reduction in violent crime.
“We don’t want 16 more business robberies across our large city. However, we always want to hear a 29% reduction in violent crime,” she said. “I just don’t want this to spiral out into a different conversation where we’re obsessing about 16 business crimes when we’re talking about an almost 30% reduction in violent crime.”
Still, crime continues to be a major issue in Dallas, as DPD currently has only about 3,000 sworn officers despite a City report recommending about 4,000 officers to ensure public safety.
Relatedly, officials only budgeted around $654 million for the Dallas Police Department this fiscal year, opting to spend much less taxpayer money on public safety than other high-crime cities, like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. The Dallas City Council adopted the budget despite DPD’s officer shortage.
The impact of the police shortage has been felt in Downtown Dallas. The city center logs much higher rates of criminal activity than Fort Worth’s downtown area, which is reportedly patrolled by a dedicated neighborhood police unit that works alongside private security guards.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, Council Member Jaynie Schultz’s District 11 has seen a more than 100% year-over-year increase in robberies in 2024, however, data from the City of Dallas crime analytics dashboard does not specify whether the offenses were committed against individuals or businesses.
