Even as the Dallas Police Department has been managing to bring down certain categories of violent crime, racial minorities continue to make up the overwhelming number of victims in Dallas.
According to the City of Dallas victim demographics dashboard, as of October 27, 50.5% of violent crime victims in Dallas have been black this year. Some 35.7% have been Hispanic or Latino.
“You cannot have public safety if you don’t have community and law enforcement and all other stakeholders working together, for real, with a common cause to impact crime and affect [positive change] in neighborhoods,” opined Antong Lucky, president of the anti-violence nonprofit Urban Specialists, per a previous interview with The Dallas Express.
Of the 5,461 aggravated assaults committed within the city limits, 2,790 befell black individuals, and 1,952 happened to Hispanic or Latino people. Such individuals are also grossly overrepresented among Dallas murder victims, with 118 logged as black and 66 Hispanic or Latino so far this year.
When it comes to violent sex offenses, black people comprised 43.7% of the victims, and Hispanics and Latinos made up 36.9%. Of all sex offenses victims, regardless of race, 90.2% were women or girls.
DPD has struggled to curb crime overall due to an ongoing officer shortage. It maintains a force of fewer than 3,200 sworn personnel, roughly 800 less than the 4,000 recommended by a city analysis.
The effects of the shortage can be seen above all in Downtown Dallas, especially when crime rates are compared to the downtown area of Fort Worth, which is reportedly patrolled by a designated neighborhood police unit working alongside private security guards.
“We did a canvas of four neighborhoods that were deemed hotspot neighborhoods, more likely to have police violence, more likely to have community violence, et cetera. … About 90% said, ‘we want more police presence in these areas,’” Lucky claimed. “This is totally contradictory to what the talking heads were saying, right? And the people saying, ‘defund the police, do away with the police.’ We didn’t tell people what to say. That’s what they wrote on the [survey].”