Dallas murders, violent crime trending down in 2024 as homicides continue drop nationwide

Violent crime was down in the first quarter of 2024 in Dallas, led by a sizable drop in murders and aggravated assaults, according to data released by the Dallas Police Department.

Police officials told the Dallas City Council’s Public Safety Committee this month that the chief’s violent crime reduction plan continues to show success as the department hones in on improving quality-of-life issues at some apartment complexes and boosts enforcement in small areas of the city identified as high-crime. The department’s statistics through Monday show violent crime is down about 19.6% in 2024 compared with the same point in 2023.

“When you look at how we’re staying afloat, it’s because of the proactive policing of the men and women of this police department,” Dallas police Chief Eddie García told the Public Safety Committee. “This is not a celebration, this is not a touchdown dance, but this is a time of reflection to see the work that these men and women continue to do.”

Dallas police reported 63 murders as of April 15, down 27.6% from the same period in 2023, when the city recorded one of its deadliest annual tolls in more than two decades. Aggravated assaults have fallen by a similar percentage over the same period.

The downward trend in murders is happening in cities nationwide. Homicides dropped about 20% in 133 cities this year through March compared with the same period in 2023, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited sizable drops in Philadelphia, New York City and Columbus, Ohio, as examples.

Boston, which reported 11 homicides at this point last year, has only recorded two so far in 2024, officials there said.

Robberies in Dallas haven’t seen as significant of a drop as murders and aggravated assaults over the same period. Robberies targeting individuals have fallen 7.6%, while robberies involving businesses have risen.

Experts told The Dallas Morning News national crime numbers appear to be returning to pre-COVID-19 levels. But researchers and police officials historically have worried about the summer, when more people are outside and on summer break. As the weather warms, challenges have already appeared in Dallas.

Police responded to gunfire early Sunday that killed 21-year-old Coriesha Bradford — described as an old soul who loved music — and wounded eight other people. The Dallas Police Department opened an internal investigation to probe whether its response could’ve been better.

The department reported at least four other homicides last weekend, including the fatal shootings of Isaiah Blasig-Prickett, 20, early Friday in the Love Field area; Shaketta Johnson, 30, who was found in her vehicle Saturday in east Oak Cliff; Sofonias Eduardo Gonzalez Morgan, 27, slain Saturday in northwest Dallas; and Mavion Goldman, 20, who was one of a group of three shot Saturday night in east Oak Cliff.

García told the Public Safety Committee that as summer nears, an important measure will be the mayor’s “Summer of Safety” campaign, an annual effort to keep young people occupied through activities sponsored by the city for free or at a reduced cost.

“This is no time to let down, this is the time to put our foot on the gas and continue on our goals with the city of Dallas,” the chief said.

Crime plan

The chief’s crime plan centers on three strategies:

• Hot-spot policing, or heightened police presence in about 60 small 330-foot-by-330-foot grids with high rates of crime.
• Place-network investigations, through which officials try to disrupt criminal networks and improve quality-of-life issues at select locations.
• Focused deterrence, which aims to change the behavior of high-risk offenders through arrests, community involvement and social services.

Police are in the 15th phase of hot spots, and targeted five locations for place-network investigations, where they and other city agencies have tried to address quality-of-life issues and other underlying causes of crime: 3550 E. Overton Road in east Oak Cliff, 11760 Ferguson Road in Far East Dallas, 11511 Ferguson Road, 3535 Webb Chapel Extension in northwest Dallas and 4722 Meadow St. in South Dallas.

At the public safety meeting, Mike Smith, a criminologist from the University of Texas at San Antonio who is working with police on the plan, provided an update on how the plan is performing in its third year.

Smith pointed to a decrease in aggravated assaults in the second half of last year and called the numbers “encouraging,” connecting them with the recent decline in murders.

Aggravated assaults “are typically a leading indicator for murder,” he said. “That trend that we saw in 2023 with aggravated assaults has begun to pay off.”

García previously said aggravated assaults are “attempted murders” — and that reducing those offenses is key to any reduction plan.

Smith told The News his research has shown a clear link between the department’s use of hotspot policing and the city’s decrease in violent crime. The strategy has been around for decades according to Smith but has been implemented uniquely in Dallas, which he said has led to its success.

Most of the research on this technique has used city blocks to group crime instances. Smith said that because blocks vary in size, measuring the impact of the strategy isn’t as consistent. Clustering data with the standardized 330-foot squares that Dallas police already had in their mapping system helped make the impact of police presence more uniform, he said.

Smith also said most hotspot policing experiments run for three to six months only. The Dallas project has seen greater success as it has run consistently for two and a half years, he said.

“To my knowledge, we’re the only research team and Dallas is the only city that has ever done hotspots policing this systematically for this long,” he said. “It’s worked out well beyond anyone’s expectations … to the point where other cities around the country are now copying it.”

Council member Cara Mendelsohn, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, told police she thought the statistics were “remarkable” since the department has already overseen three years of overall violent crime reduction since 2020. She pointed to the drop in murders so far this year.

“I know you always say don’t celebrate yet, right, you don’t want to jinx it, but that’s 21 less people murdered this year compared with last year,” Mendelsohn said. “That’s extremely meaningful.”

Derrick Battie, former chair of the District 3 Public Safety Committee, said he appreciates the work Dallas police have done to get violent crime numbers trending in the right direction but wants to see more investment from the city.

The application process for city funding of violence prevention work is too onerous and caters to large companies with the resources to spend on intense applications, he said. Battie would like to see city departments prioritize community organizations already on the ground and work with them to help them access the funding.

“They have to have individuals that are passionate about their jobs and compassionate to our people,” he said. “Give these people a chance, let them do this work no one wants to do, fund them properly, and watch them help DPD and our great chief continue to reduce crime.

“Finally, people can begin to say ‘I feel safe. It is safer according to the data, but I actually feel safe when I walk outside,’” Battie continued. “And I don’t think we’ve gotten there yet. I know we haven’t.”

National trends vs. Dallas

Alex Piquero, a professor of criminology at the University of Miami and former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, said the homicide tally began to fall in most big cities last year. The first quarter of this year in the U.S. appears to continue that trend, he said, bringing the country back to pre-pandemic levels.

He said possible reasons for the drop include:

• Prevention and intervention programs in schools and the community that were shut down during COVID-19 are happening again.
• Police are able to engage more with crime plans and residents since people aren’t shuttered at home.
• The economy is “fairly good” and “kids are back in school.”

“The last few years obviously saw a turn for the worst, but I think we’re going back to where we were,” Piquero said. “And it’s happening everywhere. It’s not just in Dallas.”

He said he’s hesitant about aggravated assault statistics because many of them are never reported to law enforcement and can be coded differently. He said he looks more closely at robberies and homicides.

The chief’s violent crime plan shows that Dallas is following programs backed by scientific evidence, which is a good model for other cities, he said. He noted that cities have to implement a mixture of police and non-police initiatives — like community violence interrupter programs, cleaning and greening, and focused deterrence.

“The police stuff is tactical,” Piquero said. “You’re hoping that you get the bad guys off the street, but then you also have the 5-year-old kid who in 10 years might pick up a gun. So what are we going to do right now with that 5-year-old kid to make sure that he or she doesn’t pick up that gun in 10 years?

“And then we have the 14-year-old kid who might pick up a gun tomorrow, right? And so what do we do with that?”

As Dallas moves forward, Piquero said, officials need to start planning ahead for summer, when kids are out of school. Shootings tied to parties — like what occurred last weekend in Dallas — are very difficult to prevent out of hand, he said. But many disputes tend to originate from social media before they are carried out in the real world.

“Anytime you put people with alcohol and guns, it’s not a good mixture,” Piquero said. “Those are the kinds of things that are very difficult to prepare for at stopping right now, but by doing these other things, you can potentially stop them tomorrow or next week or the week after.”