Drug offenses citywide ticked up slightly year over year in February, but two city council districts saw significant increases that essentially offset any drug-related crime reduction that month elsewhere in Dallas.
Council Member Jesse Moreno, three-time Crime Boss of the Month winner and current reigning Crime Boss for his dismal Crime Score showing in February, logged a 66.7% spike in reported drug offenses in District 2, according to the City of Dallas Open Data crime analytics dashboard.
Moreno’s district, which includes the southern part of Downtown and a lot of the area around Dallas Love Field, had 135 documented drug crimes committed in February, 54 more than were registered in February of 2022.
District 6, represented by Council Member Omar Narvaez, also sustained a significant increase in drug offenses, clocking a 30.4% hike, with reported incidents increasing from 115 to 150 year over year that month.
Narvaez’s northwestern district got the Crime Boss spotlight earlier this year for being the city’s primo destination for prostitution and sex trafficking.
Together, Districts 2 and 6 accounted for about 38% of the 756 drug crimes in Dallas in February. The district with the third-most reported drug offenses that month was Council Member Carolyn King Arnold’s District 4, with 79 incidents and a year-over-year increase of 9.7%, according to City data.
This increase in drug crimes comes at a time when fentanyl overdoses have been on the rise in North Texas, with the drug once again making local headlines after a string of medical emergencies and deaths among students in a local school district were apparently tied to a drug house in Carrollton.
As previously reported in The Dallas Express, getting a handle on the Dallas area’s fentanyl problem is a top priority of the new special agent in charge of the FBI’s Dallas field office.
A request for comment was sent by The Dallas Express to the offices of Council Members Moreno and Narvaez, but no response was forthcoming 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.