City Councilwoman Carolyn King Arnold’s District 4 saw reported drug offenses shoot up last December amid an overall citywide uptick in drug crimes.
District 4 is located south of downtown, consisting of most everything north of Loop 12 but south of the Trinity River between I-35E and I-45, including the Cedar Crest and Five Mile Creek neighborhoods.
Arnold, a previous winner of the title Crime Boss of the Month, vice chairs the city council committee on Economic Development and sits on the Environment & Sustainability, Housing & Homelessness Solutions, and the Quality of Life, Arts, & Culture committees.
For the month of December, drug violations spiked by 43.9% year-over-year in District 4, according to the City of Dallas Open Data crime analytics dashboard.
Police logged an 11.8% increase year-over-year, with 795 total drug offenses within the city limits that month, of which roughly 12% belonged to Arnold’s district.
The trend appears to be continuing into 2023, with District 4 clocking a 41.4% increase in reported drug crimes year-to-date, way ahead of the citywide spike of 11.6%.
The Dallas Express reached out to the Dallas Police Department (DPD) and asked whether the department has noticed any trends in drug crimes, particularly in and around south Dallas.
DPD referred The Dallas Express to the department’s arrest statistics dashboard, which indicated that the South Central Division (which polices Arnold’s district and made the most drug busts in the city this month) had seen a more than 100% increase in drug-related arrests year-to-date, suggesting a marked increase in drug activity in the area.
Prior to the recent uptick in drug offenses in her district, Arnold got into a little hot water flirting with the Defund the Police movement.
During a vote on the 2021 budget, she and other council members moved to cut police and firefighter overtime. She subsequently denied the vote constituted “defunding,” stating:
“You may have heard the City Council voted to defund the Dallas Police Department. That’s not true! Twelve of my colleagues and I voted to reprogram $7 million in police overtime pay in order to create programs and outreach efforts that will help reduce neighborhood crime rate.”
In the same statement, Arnold went on to note what her district’s constituents were concerned about as it pertained to public safety:
“District 4 community leaders have identified some of the issues they would like to address, such as drug trafficking, prostitution, and gunshots at all hours.”
The Dallas Express reached out to Councilwoman Arnold for comment on her district’s drug crime problem and what she has been doing to tackle it, but no response was received by press time.
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.