The Perception and Truth Behind Violence in Dallas

Prominent Dallas headlines over the last month portray a city in chaos. 

A sniper shot three people—killing two—outside a federal immigration office in the Stemmons Corridor. Three people were found dead in West Dallas after a car crash ended in gunfire. An argument in Old East Dallas preceded the beheading of a motel manager. Two people were fatally shot on DART trains. A 17-year-old girl was shot multiple times outside a Victory Park restaurant; the next day, a woman was killed at a shopping center near the city’s southern border after, according to police, she didn’t thank the suspect for holding a door open.

While the spate of violence weaves a gruesome thread about the state of the city’s public safety, Dallas police statistics communicate a different tale.

The city of Dallas is on pace to record one of its lowest homicide tallies in a decade. Police have reported 111 murders in 2025 as of Monday, a 26.5 percent drop compared to the 151 recorded at this point last year. That reduction coincides with a 14.1 percent drop in overall violent crime across 6,334 murders, aggravated assaults, robberies and sex offenses. That’s 1,041 fewer offenses than at this point in 2024.

“The work that the officers are doing day to day is making a difference,” says Dallas Police Department Chief Daniel Comeaux. “We kept the pace on the violent crime plan.”

The department’s official count does not include murders for which other agencies are the lead investigators, which means three homicides reported on public transit by DART this year and the double murder outside the immigration office are excluded (the latter is being investigated by federal authorities, and DART notes that violent and property crimes have declined 18 percent on its buses, trains, and facilities). 

Still, the significant drop has reaffirmed strategies that attracted national acclaim since being implemented in 2021, which was the first of four consecutive years Dallas reported reductions in violent crime. The department’s violent crime plan uses data and research-backed strategies to direct police resources to small geographies that account for the highest rates of violence in Dallas. It follows up enforcement with social services and neighborhood infrastructure improvements.

But criminologists say the plan might not be the only reason the city is seeing crime reductions. Its crime statistics are following the same downward trajectory as large cities across the country, says Ernesto Lopez, a senior research specialist at the Council on Criminal Justice. The nonprofit group of criminal justice experts produced a mid-year report showing that if 2025 trends continue, the national homicide rate could fall to a level the country “hasn’t seen in a very long time,” potentially as far back as the 1960s, Lopez says. Other categories of crime have also fallen, with the exception of a slight rise in domestic violence and a flat rate for drug offenses.

The homicide trend is particularly noteworthy to Lopez, who co-authored the report. Homicides in the United States began to tick up in 2019 and spiked in 2020. Many cities—including Dallas—have in recent years set a goal to return to those lower pre-pandemic levels but could see far greater reductions. Last year, Dallas’ 184 murders were the city’s lowest 12-month total since before COVID-19.

There likely won’t be a clear reason for this decrease for some time, if ever, Lopez says. Criminologists still aren’t sure why homicides rose in 2020. While some experts attribute the trend to the stress of the pandemic and officers losing morale after the social justice protests following George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, Lopez says the United States was an outlier among countries with similar economies that also went through COVID-19 but didn’t experience a rise in fatalities. There are several contributing factors to crime and more research is needed, he says.

Public sentiment about crime doesn’t often follow data. Even when crime was declining in the 2000s, surveys found that more than half of the U.S. believed it was rising, Lopez says. People tend to have a good sense of what crime is like in their immediate neighborhood, he says, but not from a macro-level view, such as citywide. Shocking incidents of violence, such as those involving children, are important to the community and get attention in the media, he says. News coverage and social media discussion of these events often frame how safe people feel about where they live, an emotional appeal that trumps the stories in the data. 

National rhetoric has ignored the broad declines. The result is federal intervention in cities including Washington, D.C., Chicago, Portland, and Memphis, where the White House has deployed National Guard troops even as data show violence dropping. “There’s a narrative that the numbers are fake for some cities,” Lopez says. “The reality is that we’re seeing very similar trends across all sorts of jurisdictions of all political leanings, states, regions.”

Lopez says it’s important to remember where a city’s crime rate hovered before the large declines. Dallas’ murder trendline followed a similar trajectory as the nation’s before the recent years of reductions. It rose from 159 in 2018 to 204 in 2019 on its way to a two-decade high of 256 in 2020, when the rate was about 20 murders for every 100,000 people. Last year, the rate was about 14 murders per 100,000 people. 

Before the violent crime reduction plan was implemented in May 2021, the city grappled with double-digit percent spikes in homicides, robberies, and aggravated assaults. The rise spurred former police chief U. Reneé Hall in mid-2019 to ask the Texas Department of Public Safety to deploy state troopers to help address the violence. Much like the recent pushback to federal troops in cities like Chicago, their heavy-handed approach, which resulted in more than 12,000 traffic stops in seven weeks, drew ire from local officials and residents who described an “overburdened” police presence that did not help reduce violence.

Former Dallas police Chief Eddie García, now the top cop in Fort Worth, was hired in late 2020 and given a mandate to curb violent crime and rebuild community trust. He paired with UT San Antonio criminologists to develop an academic approach that targets tiny areas of the city that account for an overwhelming share of its aggravated assaults, robberies, and murders. The plan’s foundation is a strategy known as hot-spot policing, which uses police data to pinpoint pockets where violence is most common. Every 60 days, Dallas police choose a few dozen “grids”—each about the size of a football field—where patrol officers increase visibility, such as flashing their emergency lights during times in which violence is most common. The strategy’s 26th rendition—40 hot spots—began Oct. 1.

Police also seek to disrupt criminal organizations through a strategy called “place-network investigations,” which includes improving infrastructure and lighting while building relationships with residents. Social workers and community advocates offer services like housing, clothing, transportation, and job training to formerly incarcerated people who the department determines to be likely to re-offend. They’re also warned of consequences should they commit another crime. Boston pioneered this model of “focused deterrence” in the 1990s, and at least 84 U.S. cities and other countries have similar initiatives.

The National Policing Institute, the national press, and even the White House began paying attention to what has happened in Dallas. The crime plan was replicated in the cities of San Antonio and Tacoma, Wash., and García hopes to implement a similar plan in Fort Worth, too. “ I still get calls regularly or emails or whatever from organizations, agencies, police chiefs, wanting to get information,” says Mike Smith, one of the UTSA criminologists who helped develop and implement the plan. He says Dallas police recently hosted officials from Atlanta and Edmonton, Canada, who hoped to hear more. In April, the Dallas City Council renewed a three-year, $337,305 contract with UTSA to continue the plan.

Still, Smith is cautious about attributing too much responsibility to the crime reduction plan considering nationwide trends follow a similar pattern. But he believes the approach has been “integral to Dallas’ success.” He hopes to see violent crime reduction remain a top priority even if the city isn’t in the troubling predicament it was five years ago. 

The plan hasn’t been without its challenges. Violent crime at one of the apartment complexes targeted in a grid—the Volara apartments at 3550 E. Overton—declined so much last year that the property fell off the list. But violence ticked up in 2025 and landed it back on the list for increased enforcement. 

City attorneys have also sued the property owners of the Meadows at Ferguson at 11760 Ferguson Road because they weren’t able to get them to the table without a court order. Smith says absentee owners at “challenged apartment complexes” turn over frequently; city attorneys might pursue civil litigation, but the owners then sell the property and the cycle begins again. The city also failed to reach an agreement with the state’s criminal justice agencies to make “focused deterrence” a condition of probation and parole, making it more difficult for police and social workers to reach the people the plan intends to target.

Comeaux, who became chief in April after serving as the Special Agent in Charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Houston division, has kept the strategies he inherited but adheres to a different leadership style than his predecessor.

The crime plan team was moved further down the hierarchy from the chief’s office, for instance. Comeaux has also ceded control to his command staff. “ I think we’re still doing all of that,” he says when asked about specifics of the focused deterrence and place-network investigations strategies. “I’m letting my chiefs do a lot of the jobs, and I’m leading and just moving things around.”

He says feedback from the public and the City Council forces him to juggle violent crime, response times, homelessness, spending, and officer recruitment. During Tuesday’s meeting of the Public Safety Committee, City Council members peppered police officials with questions about how long it takes officers to show up to calls, particularly those considered lower priority. 

Robert Uribe, the police department’s assistant director of the communications bureau, said officers “are allocated a little differently at times” to follow the crime plan and ensure violence continues to drop. “ The violent crime rate does continue to go down; this is essential and I think it’s something to be lauded,” Council member Cara Mendelsohn, the committee chair, replied. “But we also have … a lot of residents who are super frustrated, that they’re afraid the police won’t show up when they’re most needed.”

Mendelsohn then delayed discussion of the crime plan results until next month’s meeting.

Comeaux says he doesn’t emphasize any initiative over another. “Everyone’s important that lives in Dallas,” he says, “so I have to focus on everything … and the only way you can focus on everything without going absolutely crazy is by allowing your chiefs to do their job.”

The day-to-day responsibility for the crime plan now falls to Andre Taylor, a former SWAT lieutenant promoted in August to Comeaux’s command staff. As the new major over the crime plan, as well as the gang and fugitive units, he’s the central command center for a hodgepodge of statistics and critical incidents that reach his desk each day. It’s a significant change from the active enforcement style that characterized his 11 years in SWAT, but the 49-year-old says it’s rewarding to see the plan in action. “I get to learn how to fight another way,” he says. “How can we use resources, our abilities, our skills at the department, how can we place these officers into places that they need to be in order to achieve Chief Comeaux’s mission?”

Although the crime plan’s leaders see room for improvement, police brass intend to stay the course. Chaotic weeks like those described in recent headlines complicate the work. Catrina Shead, one of the top commanders overseeing the crime plan team, says police try to communicate to the public that the attacks aren’t all random—often, the victim knew the suspect. “If you just take one weekend out,” the assistant chief says, “think of all the great things that have happened.”

The crime plan’s operation—the focus on tiny geographies that account for most of the violence—happens away from much of the public view. When the plan works as intended, it should result in fewer murders and assaults, a gradual reduction of crime that the department hopes can sustain over a long period. But perception of public safety is seemingly challenged every weekend. Early Sunday morning, October 12, a fight led to a shooting by an after-hours club in Far East Dallas, near Mesquite. One person was killed and another four were injured. The incident attracted headlines from every major news source in Dallas.

When something like this happens near where people live, it’s natural for the public to ignore the positive trends shown in the data. But two things can be true: the numbers show that Dallas is a safer city than it was before the plan was implemented, despite recent high-profile crimes. Police say that while any murder is one too many, they’re undeterred in sticking to the tenets of the plan.

“It’s actually functioning exactly the way it was designed,” says Taylor, the major responsible for its implementation. “It was designed to focus in on the high areas where crime is committed and putting our resources to those areas. And that’s what we’ve done. So we’re just gonna continue with that process. It works. There’s no need to change it.”

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

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