Fort Worth police are cracking down on illegal game rooms, and they're ramping up their efforts after robbers opened fire in a game room last week, injuring one person.
Now, gaming machines are stacking up like abandoned prizes in a warehouse at Fort Worth police headquarters. Police have confiscated more than 500 of them in 30 raids since November. That includes 99 machines just this weekend, plus $100,000 in cash.
Investigators are working so hard on this, they're running out of room to store all of the machines. Over the weekend, they moved 60 machines into overflow storage at headquarters.
"This is a small portion of what they've actually got, six semi-trailers full," said Fort Worth Police Sgt. Chris Britt, pointing to the machines.
The machines themselves aren't illegal.
"You could be paying out in store credits or prizes or things like that," Britt explained.
But when businesses pay out in cash, that's breaking the law.
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"And as you can see, we're very aggressively addressing it," Britt said. "There is a lot of danger sometimes associated with those places."
That was made clear last week when five armed robbers barged into a game room called C'est La Vie Bida, with guns blazing. They stole customers' cash and wallets and shot an 18-year-old woman in the leg.
"It is a big problem," said City Councilman Carlos Flores.
It happened in Flores's district, at 3255 North Beach Street, and it's an issue he was already working on, having joined police on two recent raids.
"It's a public safety issue. Naturally, it impacts the surrounding neighborhoods, and we need to deal with it," Flores said.
He says a new ordinance has helped police crack down. In the past, they could only take the motherboards from gaming machines, but those are easily replaced.
Now that investigators can take the whole machine, businesses can't just pop back open, improving the odds of keeping a potential crime-magnet shut down for good.
Fort Worth police are still investigating whether the game room that was robbed last week was operating illegally. So far, they have not seized those machines.
