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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Dallas Knows More About Evictions Than Ever Before, Just in Time for a New Surge
CPAL’s new eviction filing dashboard is helping Dallas grasp the scale of the housing insecurity problem tenants face.
- CPAL’s dashboard allows a user to segment eviction filing data by city and county, but it can also explore more granular trends, like by ZIP codes, council districts, and school boundaries.
- In January 2022, Dallas landlords filed 2,056 evictions against tenants within the city limits. While these numbers are about half of what was filed in January 2020, this is still the highest point in the pandemic.
2025 Rental Housing Needs Assessment
The 2025 Rental Housing Needs Assessment establishes a shared fact base on rental affordability, supply, and opportunity in the City of Dallas.
- Dallas faces a 46,000-unit shortage of rental homes affordable to very low-income households earning ≤50% of Area Median Income (AMI). Since CPAL first published this report in 2023, the gap has grown by more than 12,000 units.
- Between 2021 and 2023, the number of rental units priced below $1,000 per month was cut in half — a loss of over 50,000 units. Today, 90% of affordable units for low-income renters are unsubsidized and vulnerable to market pressures.
- Half of all renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing, including 75% of single parents with children and 65% of senior renters. Extremely low-income renters spend, on average, 78% of their income on housing, leaving little room for other necessities.
Mayor's Task Force on Safe Communities
This 2019 report provides recommendations on non-law enforcement solutions to crime and violence in Dallas.
- Philadelphia’s blight remediation program reduced firearm assaults by 39%--a relatively low-cost intervention that is backed by empirical evidence that can be implemented in Dallas.
- New York’s targeted lighting pilot reduced nighttime index crimes by 36% and generated a 3x ROI. This can be replicated in Dallas by using tower lighting or expanding LED lighting in micro-geographies with high incidence of crime and low lighting.