A recent headline in The Dallas Morning News sent its
readers a chilling message: “Dallas has had 200 murders in 2019. Here’s what
that means.” [i]
It reminded everyone of the unfortunate
consequences of urban growth and the absence of sensible gun control. With 40
homicides recorded for the month of May according to news reports,[ii] Chief of Police Hall
requested that Gov. Gregg Abbott send state troopers to assist the under-staffed
Dallas Police Department to help control the alarming rise in homicides.[iii]
Although few specifics
were provided on the type of support that the state troopers provided,[iv] news reports indicated
that it was focused on the South Dallas community, that community residents
felt that the troopers presence did more harm than good and created a sense of
distrust.[v] This sense of distrust of
DPS troopers was underscored by the slaying of a black resident in South Dallas
who was stopped for failing to signal a turn.[vi] Although conflicting
reports emerged about whether the victim had drawn a gun or not, the Texas
Department of Public Safety declined to release video footage of the incident,
and the two state troopers were not indicted for the incident. The victim had been shot 16 times by the
state troopers – five times in the front and four times in the back of his
torso according to the autopsy report.
This is not the first time that South Dallas has been
singled out in reports related to increased crime. Interestingly, the Dallas Morning News story further
explained that the “majority of homicides occurred in South Dallas zip codes” but
did not provide its readers any detailed crime statistics to support this
conclusion.[vii]
Adding fuel to the fire was a recent study of South Dallas
published in Urban Science [viii]
by two social scientists who concluded that “South Dallas is safer
than only 13% of the cities in Texas and there is a 1 in 17 chance of becoming
a victim of any crime.”
In providing such a disparaging picture of South Dallas,
one would hope that journalists and social scientists are doing their due
diligence in analyzing crime data.
Unfortunately, that is not always the case.
Indeed, other independent analyses provide a different picture
of crime in South Dallas. For example, D Magazine[ix][x] and NBC 5[xi] recently released news
stories that addressed the pattern of homicides by including a map of City of
Dallas 2019 homicides produced by Robert Mundinger (www.themap.net). According
to these stories, homicides were “pretty much everywhere.” Figure 1a below
displays the map of homicides included in the NBC 5 story which illustrates the
wide dispersion of homicides throughout the City of Dallas, which is similar to
the map included in the D Magazine stories on the same topic. While the map provides a general illustration
of the distribution of homicides, it lacks important information about the
boundaries that define which city council districts are included in the South
Dallas and non-South Dallas sectors.
I produced the map below (Figure 1b) which presents the current city
council district boundaries and council person names to better illustrate the
geographic distribution of homicides, especially when drawing conclusions about
the concentration of such crimes between South Dallas and non-South Dallas
districts.
Figure 1b: Distribution of Homicides by Dallas City
Council Districts (N = 161)
Neither of these two maps, however, display all of the
homicides for 2019 since complete information was available only for 164 cases
in Figure 1a and 161 cases in Figure 1b when these maps were produced. These
missing cases, of course, could change the overall pattern of homicides
displayed by these two maps.
In addition to the lack of geographic precision in
previous news reports, I decided to verify the 2016 crime rates in South Dallas
reported in Urban Science by the two social scientists. My statistical analysis
of 2016 violent and property crime rates using Dallas Police Department data
revealed that the South Dallas crime rates reported in the Urban Science article
were highly inflated and not supported by the sources that were cited in the
published study. My analysis also confirmed that violent and property crimes
were distributed throughout the City of Dallas and not overly concentrated in
South Dallas.[xii]
Why the contradictory picture of homicides in
South Dallas? The
contradictory picture of homicides may result from several factors. First, it is
likely that the rush to report changes in homicide rates that reinforce pre-existing
perceptions of crime in South Dallas may be one factor that precludes a more
careful analysis of crime patterns. Secondly, South Dallas is composed of
several council districts whose crime patterns can vary considerably. Thirdly, Dallas County – whose population
consists mainly of the City of Dallas -- is among the top ten fastest growing
counties in the U.S.[xiii], suggesting that an
increase in the number of homicides could be a consequence of population growth
as well.
The consequences of inconsistent crime
reporting are problematic for several reasons. It is well known, for example, that the
perception of high crime rates in urban communities has been a key factor in slowing
their economic development.[xiv] While some neighborhoods in urban communities
may indeed show high crime rates, is it fair to stigmatize an entire community
based on crime incidences in smaller neighborhoods? Moreover, is it fair to stigmatize a
community based on inaccurate or inflated crime rates? Perhaps a closer look at crime patterns in the
City of Dallas may help us to re-think what we currently know about crime rates
in South Dallas.
A closer look at the pattern of homicides in the City of
Dallas challenges conventional thinking about crime. A
more complete picture of 2019 homicides was obtained by accessing the Dallas Police
Department’s NIBRS reports of crime activity dated as of 12-31-19.[xv] Figure 2 below presents the
distribution of the 207 homicides by council districts located in the South
Dallas and non-South Dallas sectors of the city. From this chart, it is clear
that a slight majority (56.0%) of the homicides occurred in the South Dallas districts,
while less than half (44.0%) of the homicides occurred in the non-South Dallas
districts.
Interestingly, the number of homicides varied greatly within
the two sectors. For example, a higher number of homicides occurred in District
4 (n=34), District 7 (n=30), District 8 (n=23), District 2 (n-22), and District
10 (n=17). In addition, several of the
districts in the South Dallas sector revealed a relatively low number of
homicides (District 1 (n=8), District 5 (n=11), and District 3 (n=10) when
compared to some districts in the non-South Dallas sector. Thus, individual districts in the non-South
Dallas sector are also contributing to the overall number of 2019 homicides. However,
what are the relative changes in the overall share of homicides since 2018 for
the South Dallas and non-South Dallas sectors? This answer to this question is
addressed by Figure 3 below.
Figure 3 compared the change in the percent of total
homicides between 2018 and 2019. It is
evident that the share of homicides in South Dallas districts declined from
66.5 percent in 2018 to 58.0 percent in 2019, while the share of homicides in
non-South Dallas districts increased from 39.0 percent in 2018 to 47.0
percent in 2019. Thus, council districts in the South Dallas sector appear to
be making progress in reducing their share of total homicides in 2019, while an
increasing share of 2019 homicides has shifted to districts in the non-South
Dallas sector – an important trend that should not be overlooked in future
interventions by state and city leaders.
Figure 4 below examines changes in the number of homicides from
2018 to 2019 for each council district. First, the net change in homicides was
considerably less (n=7) for the South Dallas districts when compared to the
non-South Dallas districts (n=30). It is
particularly noteworthy that during this one-year period, three of the South
Dallas districts showed decreases in the number of homicides, while most
non-South Dallas districts showed increases in the number of
homicides. Indeed, only one non-South
Dallas district (District 6) showed a decrease in the number of homicides. Based on this analysis, it seems that the
recent deployment of state troopers was misguided by the singular focus on the
South Dallas community.
Lastly, I was curious about the geographic distribution of
the 40 homicides that were previously reported for May of 2019 and used as
justification by City leaders to invite DPS trooper support from Gov. Gregg Abbott. In searching the same sources of police
incidents used in this report, only 25 homicides were confirmed for May of
2019. Table 1 below summarizes the geographic distribution of
these 25 homicides.
Table 1:
Distribution of Homicides for May 2019
District
|
No. Homicides
|
South Dallas
|
|
District 1
|
1
|
District 4
|
6
|
District 7
|
5
|
District 8
|
1
|
Subtotal
|
13
|
Non-South Dallas
|
|
District 6
|
3
|
District 9
|
3
|
District 10
|
1
|
District 11
|
2
|
District 12
|
2
|
District 14
|
1
|
Subtotal
|
12
|
As is readily apparent from Table 1, the number of
homicides in the South Dallas and non-South Dallas sectors were nearly
identical. Consequently, one is left to
wonder why the state troopers focused their intervention primarily on South
Dallas.
Conclusion: In summary, it seems that some improvement is
needed in the manner that crime is analyzed as well as decisions that are based
on these analyses. In the case of social
scientists, there is really no excuse for inflating crime statistics using
unreliable sources. Crime reports that
lack geographic detail are likely to lead to misguided interventions, such as
the state troopers that were sent to the South Dallas community that perhaps
should have been directed to other non-South Dallas council districts that were
experiencing relatively more increases in the number of homicides since 2018.
It might also be a
good idea to recognize districts that show yearly progress in reducing the
number of homicides or at least not showing any increases in the number of homicides.
Both journalists and social scientists
need to exercise greater care in reporting crime trends in general, but
particularly for communities like South Dallas whose quality of life has been negatively
impacted by incomplete or inaccurate crime reports. Indeed, the sources of
crime data used in this report are publicly available and not overly complex
to analyze.
The recent
announcement by Chief Hall[xvi] about initiating a
“predictive policing” plan offers some promise for reducing crime by creating an intelligence-led policing
unit that will “produce regular reports to forecast trends, identify patterns,
and facilitate a more accurate picture of who is committing a crime and
where….it will also generate a list of known offenders, active gang members,
parolees, and sex offenders for each focus area.” Some activists and community members,
however, expressed skepticism and felt that the new plan will lead to racial profiling
and more aggressive police tactics towards the victims of crime.
The predictive police
plan, coupled with a more careful analysis of the geographic distribution of
crime patterns, should help to direct interventions to the communities that
show the greatest need – not just the usual suspects.
Reference Notes
[vii]
Ibid, Garcia N. (2019).
[viii]
Crowe, J., Lacy, C., and Columbus, Y. (2019).
Barriers to food security and community stress in an urban food desert.
Urban
Science. Accessed at
https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/2/2/46
[xii] Rincon,
E.T. and Tiwari, C. (2019).
Construction
of a Demand Metric for Supermarket Site Selection: A Case Study of South
Dallas. Presentation at Applied Geography Conference, Charlotte NC, October 24,
2019
[xiv]
Ibid, Rincon, E.T. and Tiwari, C. (2019).
