How Big Data Turned an Empty South Dallas Lot Into a Vibrant Plaza

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Just two weeks ago, the parking lot at 4505 S. Malcolm X Boulevard was nothing more than that: an empty lot with cracked concrete and fading paint. Drive by it today and you’ll see life and color, splashes of yellow and red and green, a basketball court, a climate-controlled shipping container, room for vendors and nonprofits to set up, places to sit and places to play.

“It’s an area where there is a lack of financial resources and a lack of investment,” says Owen Wilson-Chavez, the senior director for analytics at the nonprofit Child Poverty Action Lab, known as CPAL, which organized the plaza project. “What would bring a sense of safety to the community and lead to a reduction in incidents of violence in the area?”

In 2019, this was the epicenter of violent crime in the Dallas Police Department’s southeast patrol division. “Malcolm X and Marburg,” says Ricky Wilkerson, a lifelong South Dallas resident who provides mutual aid services through an organization called Robbinhood Inc. He was part of the community group that helped inform programming at the plaza. “We knew that was our high crime rate area.”

CPAL put numbers to that by executing something called “risk terrain modeling.” It’s basically a targeted data analysis that splits the city into thousands of grids, some of which are the size of a couple of football fields. The Dallas Police Department’s new Office of Integrated Public Safety Solutions then uses that data to identify where to invest in lighting, blight remediation, partnerships with businesses, and other services that don’t fit neatly into what has been considered traditional police response.