City of Dallas - Police Department - Smart Policing Initiative

The City of Dallas Police Department (DPD) is requesting funding from the BJA FY21 Smart Policing Initiative (SPI) grant opportunity under Category 1: Supporting Innovation to implement DPD’s 2021 Violent Crime Reduction Plan over the course of three years. The goal of the program is to reduce gun-related violent crime throughout the whole City. DPD will work with the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) to evaluate and monitor the initiative during the three years, which will result in a final report. UTSA will serve as a subawardee and will receive $128,808 for evaluation while DPD will use the remaining $371,192 for implementation of the Plan.

DPD’s seven patrol divisions are divided into 225 beats. For reporting and analysis purposes, beats are further disaggregated into 1,156 small reporting areas (RAs) and even smaller 330’ x 330’ grid squares. An examination of violent crime at the RA level reveals that that roughly 10% percent of Dallas’ violent crime occurs within only 14 (or 1%) RAs. At the beat level, the same four beats have been among the top five violent crime areas in the City across a ten-year period. 

Using the 2021 Violent Crime Reduction Plan, DPD will begin with a short-term focus on substantially increasing police visibility at micro locations (330’ x 330’ grids) where violent crime is concentrated and prioritizing street-level deterrence and arrest of repeat offenders in these areas. Building outward, the plan incorporates a mid-term strategy focused on networks of violent places within historically violent areas of the City using a Place Network Investigations (PNI) approach. Finally, over the longer-term, DPD will lead a focused deterrence strategy and coordinate an urban blight abatement program to reduce conditions associated with violent crime and help break the cycle of violence in areas that have long been the source of most of the violence in Dallas.

By implementing these strategies, the DPD seeks to accomplish the following goals:
• Reverse the increasing trend in reported violent crime
• Reduce the annual number of victims of violent crime
• Increase community trust and engagement with the DPD to facilitate solving crimes of violence and successfully prosecuting violent offenses
• Improve place-based conditions that contribute to violence