Welcome to Above the Fray, The Lab Report’s monthly rundown of what you need to know about where you live.
Before we get started, let’s take a quick trip through The Lab Report’s journalism in September. Claire Ballor examined how the struggling foster care system has impacted kids and families. Sharon Grigsby spent time in an Oak Cliff neighborhood where violent crime is common to understand a multi-pronged effort to turn the area around. Kelli Smith went inside Dallas’ specialty courts to understand their efficacy and freelance photographer Jeffrey McWhorter traveled behind the chain link fences of a prison to see how a simple program is reuniting incarcerated mothers with their children.
For every story we cover, there are a dozen others pulling on our pant legs. Here are a few I’ve followed this month: How and why this became the summer of Flock, an important update on much-anticipated citywide zoning changes, some promising news from the jail, and DART’s clever plan to help build sidewalks.
How Dallas navigated the summer of Flock.
In the middle of Dallas’ budget season, Council member Adam Bazaldua found an unlikely muse. Gov. Greg Abbott, amid pressure from constituents across Texas, paused a state grant that paid for hundreds of Flock Safety’s AI-enhanced license plate cameras. In Dallas, that meant 321 cameras — about half of the city’s supply — shut off Sept. 15. (The city has not publicized their locations.)
Bazaldua saw an opportunity: If the Republican, generally pro-police governor was rethinking the state’s investment in surveillance, would his colleagues on the City Council consider his concerns about privacy and oversight and exit its own Flock contract? Bazaldua proposed reallocating the $1.5 million expenditure from the city’s general fund to pay for infrastructure and eviction support. His budget amendment failed spectacularly; only two of his colleagues sided with his pitch.
The cameras remain, standing sentinel near intersections and capturing images of thousands of cars that pass by each day. This data gets beamed to a Flock-managed Amazon Web Services cloud server that Dallas police and a few hundred other agencies can search during criminal investigations.
Bazaldua’s colleagues believe the potential benefit to public safety — tracking a suspect’s vehicle, sometimes in real time — outweighs the personal privacy concerns that motivated hundreds of Dallasites to harangue elected officials during panels and speak at council meetings this summer. Yes, Bazaldua knows there are cameras everywhere today — the grocery store, your neighbor’s Ring doorbell, above the entry to convenience stores. “But none of these examples are being facilitated by the government,” Bazaldua said ahead of a Flock discussion at a brewery in West Dallas in September.
Bazaldua’s proposal forced the city to show its work. We know from recent council briefings that there are now about 360 cameras operating in the city. Roughly 1,900 Dallas officers have finished Flock’s in-house training and can access the database. They must enter the offense type, reason, and case number to search for a license plate. The searches are audited internally each week. Dallas keeps the data for 365 days, well above Flock’s recommendation of one week.
The technology’s selling point is that agencies can search other networks, which allows police to track suspects who cross jurisdictions. In September, Dallas reduced access to its data from 1,508 agencies to 202 and jettisoned all federal agencies. (It did so quickly; the PowerPoint recently presented to council still had the old total.) Local governments, not Flock, choose which agencies can access their data.
The snapshot captures the license plate; the make, type, and color of the vehicle; and, according to Wired and 404 Media, can also pick up bumper stickers and other accoutrements. The best information we have about how locations are chosen? The department prioritizes “high-crime corridors.” Dallas police Sgt. Adam Reinhart told council that Flock was a “primary factor” in solving 18% of the city’s murders this year. We don’t know the exact role the technology played in solving cases outside of its core function; police say it’s a lot easier to locate a vehicle when there are so many cameras around town tracking their movement.
“Detectives want to get the bad person off the street to give closure to the victim and their families,” Deputy Chief William Griffith said during a September council briefing. “They understand the importance of this tool and what it’s used for and they take it seriously.”
We don’t know how often individuals not suspected of a crime are captured by a Flock camera. Police say it’s important to retain the data for a full year because it takes some victims months to feel comfortable reporting a crime. But officers have not detailed how often they’re pulling older imaging to defend its decision to retain the data so far beyond Flock’s recommendation. And while Dallas police have not been accused of misusing the software, we only know, courtesy of Griffith’s statements during that briefing, that the punishment for doing so would be “very harsh.”
Dallas’ Community Police Oversight Board plans to dig in further at its next monthly meeting at 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 13. A Flock representative will be on hand to answer questions. “We gotta clean up this mess or manage it,” says District 2 representative Jonathan Maples, who occupies one of the 15 seats appointed by the mayor and City Council. “Everybody wants public safety, everybody wants to feel secure. But with that great responsibility comes great accountability.”
What does the evidence say? I called criminologist Thomas Abt, director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction at the University of Maryland. He’s noticed a trend in news reports about police surveillance technology: Much of the evidence is anecdotal. Those in favor of Flock herald it as a critical tool for police to do their jobs. Those who want it gone say it’s a concerning overreach in how it broadly tracks public movement and, in some cases, has resulted in police misconduct. Abt would like to see more empirical evidence. The most notable study into the technology was funded by Flock, which also selected the agencies it surveyed.
“I feel pretty critical of Flock and others when they say this is God’s gift to public safety,” he says. “There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that it can be helpful in identifying suspects and missing persons, among other uses. I think that’s a sound argument for limited use, but it’s not an argument, in my view, that supports using Flock everywhere for everything.”
Flock has added auditing safeguards to its system as a result of the scrutiny, but its CEO has said Americans need to find a compromise between public safety and personal privacy. In Dallas, the onus is on the police department to clearly explain the strategies that Flock supports and its outcomes. Members of the public, meanwhile, are making their voices heard when they spot a new camera suddenly pointed down at the route they take to work.
“When we use technology in a targeted way to identify the most dangerous people in the most dangerous places, there’s a lot of public support,” Abt says. “When we use technology to surveil whole classes of people without much justification, the public generally doesn’t support that.”
Could the department achieve the same results with fewer cameras? Can they drill down to explain how the cameras were the “primary factor” in solving murders? Flock has proliferated in plain sight in recent years with little public discussion. The extreme ends of the debate have blurred the complicated, nuanced details that would help weigh the potential costs and benefits in allowing this system to continue unabated.
But for now, in Dallas at least, the cameras aren’t going anywhere.
How will the city’s new zoning affect you?
Remember ForwardDallas 2.0? That’s the comprehensive plan City Council approved in 2024 to guide the types of land use that should be allowed across the city. Planners have spent the last two years shaping its conceptual goals into what may become new laws. Andreea Udrea, the city’s deputy director for planning, says she expects a draft of the new code to be available to the public in October.
The 11-4 Council vote in favor of ForwardDallas 2.0 followed a year of tense public discussions. Libraries and community centers become set pieces for high municipal drama. Neighborhood associations stationed in entryways and distributed handouts as if they were kompromat positing the end of single-family neighborhoods. Duplexes would be coming to your block!
We don’t know if duplexes will be coming to your block. That will be one of the many decisions laid out in the draft in October. So too will rules regarding the location of industrial development and whether small businesses can operate near residential neighborhoods where they presently cannot. City planners are also incorporating changes to state and federal housing policies, which, for instance, have already allowed apartments to be built in areas they were previously banned through their zoning.
In the meantime, advocacy groups are holding sessions to educate residents on zoning. The Dallas Housing Coalition has teamed with nonprofit Better Block to throw three block parties in neighborhoods like Munger Place, where the Garden Cafe and “missing middle” housing like quadplexes coexist alongside single-family homes. Azael Alvarez, a project manager at Better Block, says this programming is all about the art of the possible — showing people what a neighborhood might look like if our code loosened just enough to allow for a diversity of housing types and other uses. “There are a lot of housing options that are not an 18-story tower,” he says. “We want to talk about how zoning affects neighborhoods.”
The new zoning plan will be posted on the city’s website, preceding public meetings before the City Plan Commission and the full City Council weigh in.
“Be My Neighbor” Block Parties:
Urbandale, in City Council District 5, 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday, October 17, 4105 Urban Ave. #100
Tenth Street Historic District, in District 4, from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m., 1208 E. 10th Street
The first, in Munger Place, happened on September 26.
The jail’s population is under control, for now.
On Sept. 16, the Dallas County Jail’s population dipped below 90% for the first time since 2024. It has hovered between 89% and 90% in the two weeks since. (That’s a daily census of about 6,600 to 6,700 inmates, down from an average of nearly 7,100 in March. There are 7,499 total beds.)
This is a radically different conversation compared to last September, when a KERA headline practically screamed: “Dallas County Jail is 99 percent full.” The sheriff’s office rushed to prepare long-shuttered jail cells to meet the carceral demands of the upcoming Labor Day weekend. Commissioner John Wiley Price got on the phone with state officials to get 400 inmates transferred to state jail or mental health facilities.
Those folks, often hundreds of them, sit and wait, sometimes for more than a month. To move them, the county must send penitentiary packets, or “pen packets,” to the state for processing prior to a transfer. Until this summer, those documents could only be sent through the mail or hand-delivered in Austin. That slowed things down considerably. In May, the state launched a pilot program that allowed for digital submissions. LaShonda Jefferson, the assistant director of the county’s criminal justice department, told stakeholders in a recent meeting that the jail had released more inmates than it took in for three straight months, in June, July, and August.
There is a significant financial imperative that people who have been ordered to be released or transferred are processed quickly — not to mention the disruption such a delay causes to someone’s life. It costs $98.26 to house an inmate each day. The county has already paid at least $220,000 to defendants kept in the jail after their sentences were complete; it faces at least four other federal over-detention lawsuits.
Lab notes.
Quick scenes from around North Texas.
Last Wednesday, an interesting item passed without discussion in the Dallas City Council’s consent agenda. The city and Dallas Area Rapid Transit entered into an agreement that will allow the transit agency to return more of the sales tax revenue Dallas pays toward DART’s operations to improve infrastructure near some light rail and bus stops.
DART can now participate in the city’s tax increment finance districts, specific geographies where a portion of their tax dollars are reserved for public investments within those areas. As tax revenue in one of these districts grows, a percentage of that increase can be spent on improvements in its boundaries. Eligibility requires a “transit anchor” like a light rail station or a bus shelter within the geography. Of Dallas’ 18 existing TIF districts, 10 would qualify.
It’s a mutually beneficial idea: DART doesn’t manage broken sidewalks near its assets, and Dallas has for years tried to encourage development near, and even on, the empty parking lots adjacent to light rail stations. This tax tool is another carrot for developers who may have balked at the cost of building on empty surface lots near, say, Martin Luther King Jr. Station inside the Grand Park South TIF.
The Dallas City Council voted in September to extend offering childcare subsidies to working parents. The $550,537 will go toward helping 200 families enroll their kids in an early childhood program. Eligibility is restricted to families who make up to 80% of the area median income, which, in Dallas, is no more than $96,900 for a family of four.
During the City Council’s final vote on next year’s budget earlier this month, those around the horseshoe seemed to be hinting at Chief Financial Officer Jack Ireland’s retirement. Two days later, on Sept. 18, City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert issued a memo making it official. Ireland has been a city employee for more than 30 years and became CFO in July 2022. It hasn’t been an easy ride. He’s helped develop a plan to bring both the civilian and police and fire pensions to solvency, figured out how to adequately fund city departments despite a new rule requiring half of all new revenue to go to the police department, and his last bruising budget battle involved navigating a flurry of priorities from his bosses on Council while solving a $51 million shortfall. What comes next, Tolbert wrote in the memo, is a 90-day sprint with Ireland to “develop and implement a thoughtful transition plan.”