Yes, Dallas violent crime dropped in 2022, but the number of arrests is even more
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When parents go to jail, it’s children who are the hidden victims — and that’s no long-term solution.
If you aren’t on the email list for Alan Cohen’s monthly newsletter, you’ve missed some of the smartest data- and action-driven ideas percolating in Dallas.
Cohen’s strategic blueprints include laying the foundation for Dallas ISD’s pre-K expansion and co-chairing the Mayor’s Task Force on Safe Communities.
In 2018, he created the Child Poverty Action Lab, which has steadily grown into the closest thing we have in Dallas to a think tank focused on the gnarly issues our city and county grapple with day to day.
Cohen’s most recent newsletter points to a remarkable but little reported aspect of the continuing drop in murders and other violent crimes in Dallas: Our city has gotten safer while also reducing arrests.
After decreasing a tad between 2020 and 2021, arrests in 2022 plummeted 19%, from 9,876 to 7,983.
“If there is someone who is violent, they should not be on the streets,” Cohen said. “But arresting more people is not synonymous with making us safer.”
Fewer arrests is exactly how the Dallas crime plan is supposed to work, Police Chief Eddie García told me.
García’s strategy focuses on the reality that most violent crime is generated by relatively few perpetrators working in small geographic areas.
Since May 2021, Dallas police have concentrated on violent offenders in 47 high-crime grids, each about the size of a football field. “We’re not trying to do more than take down the violent crime — no dragnet type of approach or stop-and-frisk approach,” García told me.
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