Mayor's Task Force on Safe Communities

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With more than 200 killings, violence in 2019 has brought Dallas its worst homicide tally since 2007 — a wave of tragedies that has disproportionately impacted communities of color and that has put children as young as nine years old into caskets. The city’s grim inventory of violent crime also includes 1,000 more aggravated assaults than last year.

Law enforcement action plays a vital and out-sized role in public safety, including apprehending violent criminals, identifying crime trends, and providing a sense of order. But residents, community leaders, and city officials know that we cannot simply arrest our way out of violent crime. Nonlaw enforcement solutions are necessary to address some of the root causes and environmental factors that contribute to crime.

The holistic philosophy to crime reduction guided Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson when he announced the formation of this Task Force on Safe Communities on August 19, 2019.

Mayor Johnson said then that he hoped the group would “collect and analyze all of the available data, engage with key stakeholders as well as the broader Dallas community, and then come up with specific recommendations for me and our city’s leaders to consider and implement.” During our compressed time frame, we have been involved in a concerted effort at meeting the Mayor’s request.

The recommendations we present in this report are the result of months of investigation and work on the ground to diagnose sources of violence in Dallas. These are evidence-based strategies backed by rigorous research and a track record of success in other cities, not ideas that look promising on paper but whose outcomes are hazy. Our plan was also informed by insights from the conversations of this Task Force with hundreds of people in Dallas, including residents of high-violence neighborhoods, students, community and faith leaders, families and friends of victims, police officers, and even ex-offenders.

In the following pages, we explain what these interventions have accomplished in other major cities, and what they might do for Dallas. We used the real costs and impacts on violence pulled directly from published evaluations of each of these options.

The impact analysis given for each recommendation is made independent of other action being taken, not the overlapping effects from the implementation of all the recommendations in combination with one another. Though each intervention is research-backed and empirically shown to tamp down violence on its own, we believe that folding these recommendations into a comprehensive plan that pursues multiple strategies at once provides the greatest chance to significantly reduce violence in the hardest-hit areas.

We’ve heard from and agree with the many Dallas residents that point out our recommendations will only be as helpful as the actions that follow. City leadership’s buy-in and sustained commitment to work together are critical to the success of any of these strategies. Therefore, it is also the Task Force’s hope that policymakers will monitor the initial implementation and ongoing operations of these strategies using the same data-driven approach that guided the recommendations.

This report does not prescribe the manner in which the recommendations should be implemented. Funding and programming will likely require multiple sources of revenue — both governmental and nongovernmental — and a careful selection of the right people and organizations to implement the recommendations. Such decision-making ought to be left to the appropriate policymakers.

An undertaking to address crime holistically will require a focused and sustained push from leaders across the city — both in government and in the community. The Task Force is optimistic such a collective effort is possible if we focus on both short- and long-term solutions. As Dr. Alex Piquero, a member of the Task Force and UTD Professor of Criminology, recently noted in his Dallas Morning News opinion editorial about crime in Dallas: “Together, with data and evidence-based strategies and programs that are fully funded, continuously evaluated, and scaled up, Dallas can become a model for public safety in America.”