Dallas police reported progress Wednesday toward City Hall’s goal of becoming the nation’s safest big city.
In a briefing for the City Council, Police Chief David Brown said the Dallas is now sixth in crime among the 10 most populous U.S. cities instead of last, where it was several years ago.
"It's incumbent on us all, the department, to really bring our 'A' game every year to our crime-fighting strategy, and the margin of error is really small going forward," he said.
The cities of Phoenix, Philadelphia, Dallas and Chicago are tightly packed at numbers four, five, six and seven on the urban crime list, Dallas police say.
Dallas has made steady crime-fighting progress after adding 600 more officers several years ago and installing police surveillance cameras in many areas.
Dallas police have identified 27 top crime hot spots in the city. Brown said they remain a problem even with the improvement in the overall crime rate. Making Dallas safer requires focus on those hot spots, where a majority of the city’s crime occurs, he said.
"The safest city in the country is front and center in these hot spots," he said.
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The No. 1 hot spot is the Five Points neighborhood, where Park Lane intersects with Fair Oaks Road and Ridgecrest Road east of Greenville Avenue.
"Nothing has changed," resident Antoria Robertson said.
She said low-rent apartments with nearby stores and schools might be a good place to raise her children if not for the crime she has seen while living there the past two years.
"Robbery, jacking, stealing, killing, everything -- it is No. 1," she said.
City Council members want a safer city, but they are not offering to expand the police force now, as they did a few years ago.
"We're at a point where we need to look at efficiencies inside the department to be leveraged against partnerships outside in the community," Brown said.
Council members are anxious to add more police surveillance cameras.
About 100 additional cameras will be installed in crime hot spots around the city over the next few months, but city leaders want hundreds more.
Police have also begun using license-plate-reading cameras to find and arrest wanted people.
"I know there's a difference in the hot spots in my area with those cameras and reading those license plates," Councilman Tennell Atkins said.
"You're going to need to demonstrate to us with reliable data why you need future budget increases or changes, and we'll give them to you every time as long as we get good data," he said.
Brown said police need better cooperation with residents of high-crime areas to make more progress.
"I think the message to some of our high-crime areas is, you need to start snitching," he said. "The 'stop snitching' idea is it makes you more unsafe."
Councilman Jerry Allen said he has noticed a change among neighbors in his Northeast Dallas district.
"It becomes a culture of intolerance to crime," he said.
Antoria Robertson is not convinced the surveillance cameras make a difference in Five Points but she said she is encouraged about Brown's call for better police relations with residents in her neighborhood.
"Maybe that would work instead of harassing them, you know," she said. "Be cool with them, and maybe we wouldn't be scared to call when we need you all."
