Are More Police Officers Needed for Downtown Dallas?

(TNS) — An increase in violent crime in downtown Dallas has spurred a call from city officials and local businesses to increase police presence.

Council members have met with Dallas Police Department officers over the past two weeks and asked about DPD’s plan to tackle violent assaults concentrated downtown.

“I have been contacted by several business owners who are concerned about the uptick in violent crime in the CBD (central business district),” said council member Jesse Moreno , adding that stakeholders with their own security teams are looking for ways to partner with the city in order to be more effective.

Moreno, whose district covers parts of downtown, said DPD may need to look at density and analyze whether the city center needs more police.

“I can tell you that as downtown grows, that means the amount of patrol has to grow as well,” he said.

Dallas Police Department officials say there already are more than 90 cops in the central business district — more than anywhere else in the city. The News has requested a breakdown of how the downtown compares to other parts of the city through a public records request.

Although violent crime is declining overall in Dallas , there has been a nearly 20% increase year over year in the central business district, according to data from DPD. That comes after two years of declines in violent crime downtown.

The questions about downtown safety and the police presence in the central business district surfaced following a day in September in which three people were injured in a Commerce Street shooting and a woman was hit with an object in an apparent random attack at the corner of Field and Elm streets.

DPD is still investigating the shooting and have apprehended the Elm Street suspect.

As of Sept. 15 , compared to the same time period last year, the downtown sector bounded by Interstate 35E, Interstate 30 , U.S. 75 and Woodall Rodgers Freeway , has seen crime drop by 18%. However, there were 196 violent crimes reported in the sector covering the downtown corridor, 32 more than the year before, representing a 19.5% increase.

Violent crimes include aggravated assaults, robbery, rape, fondling, murder or manslaughter, sexual assault and sodomy. The biggest year-over-year increase has been in aggravated assaults, but there also has been an increase in murder/manslaughter to four from three.

Overall crime rates downtown are lower, credited to a drop in non-violent crimes, such as auto thefts and burglaries that constitute the majority of the crimes reported in Dallas Police Department sector 130, which covers most of the central business district.

“The offenses are becoming more and more aggravated,” said Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, whose district includes downtown. “That’s what I think gives us some real pause.”

The Dallas Morning News contacted 14 stakeholders, including residents, City Council members, county officials, security officials, business owners and developers. All agree DPD and City Hall have a layered task at hand: Address crime and battle the perception that downtown is dangerous.

“There is so much to protect, nurture and continue to grow in downtown,” said Jennifer Scripps , president of Downtown Dallas Inc. , a nonprofit that oversees the downtown public improvement district.

But one terrible situation, she said, can put all of the progress at risk.

“We feel downtown is safe”

Steve Shepherd is a fierce advocate and former chair of the downtown Residence Council. The Realtor has lived in the city center for nearly two decades.

“It’s like living in a little part of Chelsea in New York — not Midtown Manhattan —- just a little part of where there’s some tall office buildings, there’s good transportation,” Shepherd said.

His heart sank last week when his phone blew up with news of the Commerce Street shooting.

“I found it very alarming when they started mentioning there’d been a shooting. The first thing that was said was the nearness to Neiman Marcus,” Shepherd recalled. As it turned out, the shooting did not happen near the department store. but the initial frenzy around the perception of crime near a business worried Shepherd.

“That’s not what our lives are like downtown,” Shepherd said.

Krista Nightengale , executive director of Better Block, a nonprofit that gives communities resources to improve their neighborhoods, moved downtown 14 years ago with her husband.

Main Street Garden Park , which opened in 2009, was a big draw for the couple because they have a dog. The biggest danger she feels is when motorists run a red light when she’s at a crosswalk, Nightengale said.

“I’m always wishing for a little bit of traffic calming and some other ways to kind of signify that there are pedestrians,” she said.

Improving the built environment is a big piece of making downtown feel safe. Additional officers patrolling the streets isn’t enough, Moreno said.

“It’s going to take a combination of partners. It’s going to take a combination of technology,” he said.

More lighting, cameras, panic buttons and other devices are among the things the city should pursue for downtown, Moreno said.

People who live downtown also might be less likely to feel threatened by things that would worry suburbanites who visit or work downtown, said Tony Love , an associate professor of criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas .

Neighbors in a residential neighborhood get suspicious if they see a car or a stranger they haven’t seen before, Love said. That’s not the case in a business district like downtown that is more transient. Most people who come and go don’t know each other unless they work together.

Still, challenges remain.

“Any place that’s designed to bring a lot of people together kind of can create that soup of willing perpetrators and feasible victims,” Love said.

Quality of life concerns make up bulk of day to day complaints downtown

On a Thursday afternoon, at the Civic Garden downtown, James Hosey, DDI’s field operations assistant manager looks on as another member of the security team checks on a man sitting on a bench presumably asleep with his shoes undone.

DDI security teams, often the first line of engagement, spend much of their day patrolling downtown, waking up people experiencing homelessness sleeping in parks and asking them to move, Hosey said. The team of five to six works in shifts to tackle homelessness five days a week. They also work seven days a week to remove trash, animal feces and graffiti.

The first shift starts early in the morning after workers are briefed on the number of alerts on the security system, most collected through the See Say App, a mobile application that can be used by residents to reach the security, homeless outreach and clean team. Another shift starts late in the afternoon and continues into the night.

The majority of reports are better categorized as quality of life concerns, said Larry Gordon , DDI’s chief of public safety and field operations. They include reports of people loitering near businesses, sleeping in playgrounds and encampments of people experiencing homelessness in places such as the Cancer Survivor Park.

Workers have noticed an increase in alerts after the city’s work with a coalition of partners led by Housing Forward and DDI began decommissioning encampments and offering paths to housing and services on the southern side of downtown.

Most people experiencing homelessness gravitate toward the city center in search of resources and government offices concentrated around City Hall and county buildings.

“At the end of the day, they’re just looking for shelter,” Hosey said.

A big challenge facing American cities today, particularly their downtowns, is homelessness, Love said. Their presence often is lumped into the broad umbrella of safety.

DPD Executive Assistant Chief Michael Igo said it was not accurate to say the increase in crime is all from people experiencing homelessness.

“I know there’s been a lot of conversation around the unhoused population where a lot of that fear is coming from,” Igo said. “But from those offenses, roughly, a conservative estimate is anywhere around a third of those offenses are attributed to the homeless,” Igo said.

How a crime is reported is also a complex exercise, he said.

“The problem we run into is that when we pull the offense reports, if a person’s not listed as homeless or they don’t give one of the two locations as being the Stewpot or the Bridge (providers), and they give an address they used to live at, we can’t track them as being homeless.” he said.

Ensuring residents feel secure is a continuous challenge for the city. More than half the respondents of a 2024 community survey conducted by the city thought crime was a major problem in Dallas , and just over a quarter of the respondents felt very or somewhat safe from violence.

“Public perspective is a really fickle thing,” Love said. “People latch on to, it seems like, the most sensational things and then they try to generalize that to being the norm in a particular place, and that’s usually not very true.”

What comes next?

Council members Paul Ridley and Moreno said they were scheduled to meet with business owners downtown earlier this week on Tuesday. The News reached out to one of the business owners by text and phone and did not hear back.

Measures are also being taken at the county level, according to Dallas County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins.

“We want to make sure that our downtown business district is strong and, not only is it safe, but it is perceived to be safe,” Jenkins told the News Sept. 17.

Commissioners approved beefed-up security at the county buildings as part of an initiative to have more law enforcement presence in all of Dallas County’s four districts, Jenkins said. Many of these security decisions occurred before the two incidents downtown.

“Our bike patrols are down there seven days a week, eight hours a day, conducting extra patrols in that area,” Igo said.

Igo, who oversees DPD’s patrol bureau, said the Central Patrol Division held monthly meetings with stakeholders to stay updated on potential new trends or information. “But we feel the downtown is safe,” he said.

Moreno, on the lookout for a decline in violent crime, said he “won’t be content” until he sees more officers patrolling in the area.

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