Fort Worth police are using a computer program to identify high-crime neighborhoods and swarm those areas with 70 officers.
"Every day we get that data and we put officers where that data says they need to go," said Fort Worth police Sgt. Marc Povero. "Those areas change daily."
They can also change hour by hour, he added.
"They just do regular patrol," Povero said. "This is not a group of tactical officers who are serving warrants or anything like that. These are officers in uniform conducting normal patrol."
The crime data is analyzed by a computer program called Omega CrimeView Dashboard, which the department purchased last year.
Other cities have tried similar approaches to combating violent crime but rarely with so many officers in the same area at the same time.
Those assigned to the Violent Crime Task Force are detectives and other officers who are not ordinarily assigned to the patrol division, Povero said.
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Among the possible drawbacks are that detectives assigned to the task force will be taken away from other important duties and that crime could simply go back up again in areas after the task force moves to a new neighborhood.
The task force just started a few weeks ago, so it is too early to judge its success, Povero said.
