Where Did the Patrol Cops Go?

Last year, the Dallas Police Department increased the number of cops patrolling the streets for the first time since 2020.

City leadership has known since at least 2019 that the department needed to reassess its approach to patrol. An analysis by the auditing firm KPMG, commissioned by the City Council, suggested police realign resources in order to improve efficiency among the rank and file. One of its findings: Patrol officers were even uncertain of their priorities in the field. 

But in the years after the nearly 400-page study, the police department focused its attention outside traditional patrol units. It took a few of KPMG’s recommendations, hiring more civilians to work the desks and changing policy to make residents report minor crimes online instead of calling 911. But there were suddenly more pressing matters. 

The department instead looked to specialty units and new assignments that it established to reduce historic increases in murders and other violent crimes. While 2021 marked the first year of an ongoing streak of annual declines in citywide violence, patrol totals continued to fall and response times to calls of every priority shot up.

After becoming Dallas’ new police chief in April, Daniel Comeaux targeted improving how long it takes officers to arrive at a scene after noticing staffing trends in the city’s eight patrol divisions.

While total patrol numbers have begun to tick up since his arrival, some divisions have benefited more than others. One is the Central Business District, the downtown neighborhood that has significant business and quality-of-life implications for the city at large. More officers have been sent downtown in the last year than to parts of the city that grapple with higher rates of violence, like the three patrol divisions south of Interstate 30. 

Downtown is now at its highest staffing level in a decade, and that excludes private security, code enforcement, and DART cops. North Central, a swath from the city’s northern border with Plano down to Amherst Avenue, and Northwest, the area between Dallas’ border with Farmers Branch to Commerce Street near downtown, also ended 2025 with higher staffing levels than six years ago.

The opposite is the case for the three southern patrol divisions and the Northeast Patrol Division. An analysis of the last seven years of staffing data show these areas still have not made up for the reductions of the last few years. Southeast, the most impacted, shed 46 officers, or about 15 percent of its staff, since the end of 2019, according to police data.

Southeast, a portion bounded by Interstates 45 and 30 extending to the city’s border with Mesquite, accounted for the largest share—20.6 percent—of Dallas’ violence last year. It also has the worst response times to the highest-priority calls. A “priority two,” which is considered the second-most serious and can include domestic violence incidents, took officers an average of 32 minutes to get to in 2020. In 2025, that average was about 179 minutes, according to city data.

Dallas’ patrol divisions range in size from CBD’s 1.5 square miles to Northeast’s 85.4, and research has shown that it’s not necessarily the number of officers that matters but how they police. Dallas’ violent crime plan, much of which is staffed outside of patrol divisions, sends officers to tiny geographies where violence is most common. Public safety officials have credited this approach with citywide reductions, but police departments still consider patrol to be foundational to the entire operation. The boots on the ground in Dallas’ patrol divisions interact with residents each day and are expected to respond to everything from shootings to minor thefts and noise complaints.

While police officials say they assign patrol based on crime data and calls for service, staffing decisions are never black and white. The chief is also charged with managing perceptions of public safety in high-traffic corridors like Deep Ellum and downtown. Criminologists say top cops must balance economic, political, and internal pressures in major cities like Dallas, which has a population of 1.3 million people across 386 square miles.

“Welcome to being a big city police chief, where you have multiple constituents who all want something different,” says Alex Piquero, a criminology professor at the University of Miami and former director of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. “You have to find a way to either please them all or say, ‘You know what, I'm going to do what I think is right.’”

By the end of 2025, Comeaux's administration added 37 patrol officers to the Central Business District, 21 to South Central, 20 to Northeast, 15 to Southwest, eight each to Northwest and North Central, and one to Southeast. Central, which includes neighborhoods around downtown like Uptown and Old East Dallas, lost eight officers. (Comeaux attributed the decline to the Central Business District surge; CBD used to be part of Central, and the two are still often grouped in metrics reported by police.)

Staffing in the urban core grew from 90 to 127 officers as part of the “Safe in the City” campaign, an initiative led by City Hall and downtown stakeholders. The public-private partnership stemmed from concerns that crime and public disorder were spurring businesses to depart a neighborhood critical to the city’s tax base. Downtown made headlines in 2025 after a security guard was fatally shot and, on separate occasions, videos captured innocent bystanders being randomly assaulted. 

Along with the influx of patrol officers, the city banned sleeping on downtown streets and ramped up efforts to rehouse unsheltered residents and disrupt their gatherings. Police also promised a new command center downtown. The changes received ample public attention amid rhetoric that Dallas was losing control of its downtown.

If Comeaux allocated patrol based only on violent crime, this approach would appear backward. The Central Business District reported 2.5 percent of Dallas’ violence in 2025, but now has 6.9 percent of its patrol. The Southeast Patrol Division, by contrast, has 13.6 percent of patrol despite accounting for about one-fifth of the city’s violent crime. Southeast reported 36 murders and 1,129 aggravated assaults in 2025; CBD tallied six murders and 104 aggravated assaults.

Accounting for population alone, your chances of being a victim of violence are highest in South Central, followed by Southeast, then the combined Central and CBD—but that excludes ambient population, the scores of people who travel to different parts of the city for work or entertainment. The southern divisions typically lose people during the day, while Central and CBD’s population shoots up.

Researchers usually recommend a staffing model that analyzes calls for service. Northeast had the most calls last year, followed by Southwest and the combined Central and CBD. But the most serious requests tie up more officers and take longer to close, which could suggest that allocation be based on the divisions that see the highest priority calls instead of all calls. Now consider that Northeast and Southwest are the largest by geography, which might require more staffing to make up for travel time.

It’s a complicated puzzle, the pieces of which can shift depending on the priorities of the city. Eddie García, Dallas’ police chief from 2021 to 2024, says “the No. 1 priority for any police department is answering the 911 call for service.” García, who is now the top cop in Fort Worth, inherited a department in Dallas that was battling double-digit percent spikes in violence, including a two-decade high murder tally in 2020.

He commissioned a violent crime plan and began staffing special assignments. Over the next two years, patrol—and the department as a whole—shrank as DPD failed to hire enough officers to outpace attrition. The department grew overall in 2024, but patrol fell again. Meanwhile, staffing in special operations and investigations, where detectives and most specialized units are housed, increased. 

Total patrol staffing fell from 1,987 in 2020 to 1,754 by the end of 2024, a decline of about 12 percent. Response times began to slow. For instance, priority two calls usually took officers between 21 to 32 minutes to respond to in 2020 depending on division, according to city data. In 2024, priority two response times ranged from an average of 45 minutes in Central to 199 minutes in the Southeast. 

García says he tried to make decisions with patrol in mind, noting investigative bureaus can augment patrol’s work. (He also moved neighborhood patrol officers into a community engagement bureau, which slightly depresses each patrol division’s numbers.) “Every chief in America says patrol's the backbone of the department,” García says. “We just need to act on that more often.”

Piquero, the criminologist, says police must constantly triage competing priorities. “There's no one-size-fits-all answer,” he says. “It really depends on each jurisdiction's local conditions.” While response times might be the most pressing topic today, five years ago, when García arrived, police were contending with high violence, the COVID-19 pandemic, officer turnover, and strained community trust after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “It's like a head coach,” Piquero says. “You're gonna get it from everybody, and so you just gotta do the job and hope for the best.” 

García’s violence reduction plan included a new unit with officers who try to disrupt criminal organizations by improving infrastructure, like adding lighting and clearing blight, and building relationships in small areas that account for the highest rates of violence. The plan also includes “hot spot policing,” when patrol focuses attention on the most violent “grids,” about the size of a football field, and flashes emergency lights at hours when crime has shown to be highest. This effort was in addition to standard patrol responsibilities. 

The grids changed every 60 to 90 days based on the data, which meant García oversaw up to about 60 at any given point during his time leading the department. To be a grid, each 330-by-330-foot location needed to lead the city in unfortunate ways: most aggravated assaults, robberies, and murders. “That wasn’t a feather in your cap,” García says.

García also had to contend with other pressures. He staffed a specialized weekend Deep Ellum team with cops from other patrol divisions after several high-profile violent incidents, which he says frustrated him. Even so, he says he had to hear out various constituents. “Businesses play an incredibly crucial part in the success or failure of any city,” García says. “You have to listen to them. You have to listen to your elected leaders here and see where they're at, to your city manager, and the mayor.”

The Deep Ellum of today appears to be the Central Business District, especially after AT&T, one of the region’s largest employers and a downtown anchor, announced it was moving its global headquarters to Plano. Some politicians seized on the departure. Gov. Greg Abbott told reporters in January that AT&T was bailing because of officer staffing and homelessness in the city’s core. But police data showed that downtown violence and overall crime declined here more than 10 percent last year.

The new cops downtown are largely recent graduates from the police academy. Every patrol division is equally important, Comeaux contends, and asserts that “Council and business does not have any effect” on his decisions. Pressed on how that squares with the downtown surge, he says: “Downtown wasn't represented the way it should have been represented in past years. So we made the decision and it was a decision based off of facts and stats that downtown needed to be ramped up.  It was not shown the love that it should have been shown.”

Those stats included more than just violent crime, he says. “You had traffic violations that were being broken every single second,” he says, “and then you had a homeless population that felt like they can just sleep on any corner at any given second.” 

Comeaux measures success by response times, which he notes are now dropping citywide. For the most part, data show officers did respond to all priority calls faster than in 2024. In some cases, much faster—a priority three in Northeast took an average of 412 minutes in 2024 but dropped to 288 last year. But that wasn’t the case across all police divisions. The average length of time it took Southwest officers climbed for all priorities except the most serious, priority ones, which stayed flat at about 12 minutes.   

City Council member Paul Ridley, whose district includes downtown, says a few incidents stirred fear in the city’s core. People became concerned, even if the overall data didn’t support those sentiments. “That's a natural human reaction, I suppose,” Ridley says. “But it's time that reality caught up with that perception.” 

“Their new tactics and staffing are having a tremendous positive effect on crime rates and quality of life downtown,” Ridley says.

The flip side of that coin is the Southeast Patrol Division, which ended 2025 with 251 officers—down from the 297 it had at the end of 2019. (The actual number of officers responding to calls is closer to 227; patrol bureaus assign some officers to special assignments.) In 2020, a priority two call took Southeast officers an average of 32 minutes to respond. In 2025, that average was a minute shy of three hours. 

Comeaux says police struggle to maintain staffing there because “the best officers are created at Southeast” and are poached to join specialized units.

To Piquero, the criminologist, it’s not “an either or” when it comes to re-prioritizing how to allocate resources depending on the needs at the time. “The optics of public safety is huge,” he says. “The No. 1 thing the community would say to feel safer: They want police around. The irony of that is the sense of, well, that doesn't always solve the problem.” 

Council member Jaime Resendez, whose district includes southeastern Dallas, says he’s consistently heard calls for more officers in his district, just as he’s heard complaints about the large investments into police instead of other city resources. Resendez grew up here, in Pleasant Grove, which often felt like Dallas’ forgotten stepchild and still struggles with the perception that its neighborhoods aren’t safe, he says. 

Resendez believes it’s important to address safety concerns downtown. “I don't envy the chief's job,” he says. “I can't speak for him at all, but I think that the political influences are strong and they also feed into the perception of it.” But he’s also wary of the decades-long reality of city disinvestment experienced by districts in the south, including his own. The needs of communities are unique within the sprawling Southeast Patrol Division, he says, so he wants more granular data.

“To a certain extent, you have to trust what your city manager and what your police chief are doing,” he says, “while still obviously looking for ways to support them and identify potential blind spots.”

“Ultimately,” he adds, “the decisions have to be data-based.”

Soon, another study might help guide Dallas’ resource allocation. Police officials are reviewing a second KPMG analysis that could spur them to redraw the city’s patrol boundaries and open new substations. The City Council in 2023 approved a $500,000, five-year contract to analyze the department’s footprint. Residents may see a massive shift in where and how often police are in their neighborhood based on its results and their implementation.

“A police chief is going to want to allocate his or her patrol officers to the areas that have the most crime,” Piquero says. “And it's not necessarily, for example, the southeast or the south central, it's where in the southeast and where in the south central they need to go.”

The police department hasn’t undergone a citywide redrawing of patrol boundaries in decades. (Police officials believe the last time was around 2007, when the South Central Patrol Division, near the city’s southern boundary, was established.) Comeaux says he sent the new KPMG report back to researchers last year for a deeper look into how the department defines its priority calls. He confirmed his team is reviewing it now to determine the best way forward.

“We're gonna start looking at it really aggressively here soon,” Comeaux says, adding he hopes to make it public by summer. “We're looking at, ‘OK, should we break up this district and add some of this ZIP code to another channel? And add some to this channel?’ Kind of realign because Dallas has changed.”

But crime is not linear, and police departments are charged with responding to incidents that crop up quickly and attract significant public attention. Assessing the data is the simpler part; how the resources are ultimately allocated will be determined by more than just the numbers in spreadsheets.

Kelli Smith is a staff writer for The Lab Report. [email protected].

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