Dallas shows uptick in violent crime in 2023 after two-year downward trend

Dallas shows uptick in violent crime to start 2023 after two-year downward trend

Homicides and aggravated assaults were up in Dallas in January. The city has reported a drop in violent crime over the last two years.

DALLAS - Dallas has seen two solid years of violent crime dropping across the city, but it is beginning to see a trend in the wrong direction.

"Homicides are up 9.52%, and what that translates to is 2 more victims than we had through January of last year," said Dallas Police Major Jason Scoggins at a meeting of the Dallas Public Safety Committee on Monday.

Source: Dallas Police Department

In addition to homicides, aggravated assaults were also up nearly 15% in January compared to the same month last year.

"This is something that hasn't really happened until now, toward the end, the right-hand side of the trend line is going up and this is a victim count trend line," said Scoggins.

Source: Dallas Police Department

Dallas police explained that the number of actual violent incidents was still down, but the victim count was higher in January 2023 compared with January 2022.

"If you look at the month of January, we had our lowest incident count as it pertains to aggravated assaults, homicides and robbery incidents that we've had in 5 years, unfortunately we've had several incidents, one shooting incident equaled 19 victims and, as Major Soggins pointed out, 6 shooting incidents equated to 76 victims," Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia explained. "One of the dynamics that we are working with criminologists is that our goal is to reduce incidents, and by reducing incidents we will reduce victims, but again unfortunately we have had some incidents that have had a lot of victims tied to it."

Experts tell FOX 4 it is too soon to tell if the January violent crime numbers will be a part of an overall upward trend in crime this year.

The police chief said the city is continuing its strategy of increased police presence in the highest crime areas of the city, which it refers to as grids.

"We are a month in, and we are not sitting as a department and hoping that it is going to go down because we are reducing incidents. Hope, as we know, is the worst type of strategy to have. So obviously we are looking at using data as we always do. Drilling down on every part of the data with regards to not only what we are looking at to separate fact and fiction," he said.

Dallas did still see business robberies go down by nearly 60% in January.

That fits with the larger trend pointed to over the weekend by Mayor Eric Johnson.

He claimed on Twitter that local media have no interest in reporting that Dallas is the only big U.S. city with a two-year decline in violent crime, based on a survey from an association of big city police chiefs that came out this month.

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FOX 4 News reported the downward trend as recently as last month based on updates from Dallas police.

We asked criminologist Dr. Alex Del Carmen for his perspective and he says after two years of decline in violent crime in contrast to other major cities, it will be a challenge for Dallas to continue the downward trend.

"There is a limited impact that law enforcement has on crime going down as a whole," said Del Carmen. "There are other factors that we look at such as the economy and many other components that are not simply influenced by law enforcement from year to year."

Part of the city's strategy in reducing crime does go beyond police enforcement, like cleaning up blight at apartment complexes.

Public Safety Chairman Adam McGough expressed concern about the city identifying nearly 1,600 violations and only remediating 34.

Dallas Crime and Public Safety