Crime Down, Response Time Up: Dallas Police Council Report

The Dallas Police Department will have several significant updates to provide to city council members this week during the monthly Public Safety Committee meeting.

• The overall city crime rate is down 5.8% through the end of September, compared to the same time in 2020. Some crime categories are down significantly.
  • Robberies are down 26%.
  • Sex offenses are down nearly 35%.
• It is taking longer for Dallas officers to respond to Priority 1 calls. Through the end of September, it took police an average of 8 minutes, 12 seconds to arrive at the scene of a dispatched call for the most serious category of crimes. Through September 2020, it took an average of 7 minutes, 46 seconds. That is an increase of 26 seconds.
• A full accounting of the massive data loss of city and police department files shows that more than 20 terabytes of information was deleted, which includes 8.7 million individual files that were permanently lost. The Information and Technology Services staff that have been working on the situation have been able to recover 140,353 files, and the work to recover other files continues.
• The police department exceeded its hiring goals for the 2020-2021 fiscal year. The goal had been to hire 150 new police officers. The department hired 169 new officers. But it lost 205 officers to attrition, so it sustained a net loss of 36 police officers over that time.
• Despite a highly publicized hiring blitz, the police department still needs to hire 9-1-1 dispatchers. It is authorized to have 141 dispatchers. There are currently 111 dispatchers, 33 of whom are newly hired trainees.