The police chief overseeing one of America’s most dangerous cities has revealed how his department has slashed violent crime rates in recent years.
Dallas Police Department’s Interim Chief Michael Igo said he mapped the city out in grids and honed in on crime ‘hotspots’, while also rolling out deterrence programs.
The Texas city is in the top three percent of America’s most dangerous cities, according to data analysis from Neighborhood Scout.
Dallas is wracked by 8,775 violent crimes each year on average, and 53,325 property-related crimes.
Its rate of 6.74 violent crimes per per 1,000 residents places it far above the average for Texas as a whole, which has an average 4.06 violent crimes per 1,000 people.
But Igo said his department has been turning this around, and saw a drop in 2024 – though the official figures have not yet been released.
‘In 2021, we employed criminologists from the University of Texas San Antonio, and we implemented a crime plan that was based really on three different phases or three different strategies,’ he told Fox News Digital.
‘One was hot spot policing. The next strategy was Place Network Investigations, commonly known as PNIs. And the third piece of that was focus on deterrence.’
The police chief overseeing one of America’s most dangerous cities, Dallas (pictured) has revealed how his department has slashed violent crime rates in recent years
Dallas Police Department’s Interim Chief Michael Igo (pictured) said he mapped the city out in grids and honed in on crime ‘hotspots’, while also rolling out deterrence programs
Igo said the city began by gathering intelligence on where violent crime tended to occur, and mapped Dallas out via 300-by-300-yard grids over areas police identified as having disproportionate crime rates.
‘On that data, we worked together on putting together a crime plan where our grids were identified,’ he told Fox.
‘We had what we called tag areas, where the majority of our crime was in the city. And in these grids, what we found out was where a majority of our violent crime was occurring.
‘Really the premise was we took the data, and we placed a squad car, with its lights on, in a high-violence area for just 15 minutes.’
He added that the Dallas Police Department has worked to focus on individuals who have ‘shown the most propensity to commit crimes in those areas.’
The department has also been working with non-governmental organizations to boost community deterrence programs.
Dallas became a Republican city in 2023, when the Mayor Eric Johnson switched his political allegiance.
Johnson, 47, was elected mayor in 2019 after serving more than a decade as a Democrat in the Texas House of Representatives.
Although mayoral offices in Texas are nonpartisan, Johnson’s switch was a boost for Republicans in the state who had been losing ground in major Lone Star cities for more than a decade.
The Dallas policing update comes after the sheriff overseeing the city notorious for being Florida‘s ‘murder capital’ revealed how his department has also slashed homicide rates recently – but through different methods.
The sheriff overseeing Jacksonville (pictured), the city notorious for being Florida’s ‘murder capital’ has revealed how his department has slashed homicide rates in recent years
Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters has said resisting calls to ‘defund the police’ and keep officer numbers high have been key to combating murders in the city.
The northeast Florida city was given the bleak moniker after murder rates soared in recent years – until 2023, when police started to make a breakthrough.
Some 134 murders were recorded in the city in 2022, a figure which dropped to 122 in 2023, before declining by a whopping 50 percent in just one year to 59 in 2024.
The sheriff said last year’s total of 59 murders was the lowest since 1995, when there were 86 homicides in the city which is now home to almost one million people.
‘We’ve long had the poor reputation of being the murder capital of Florida, which I resent,’ Waters told Fox News Digital. ‘I don’t like it at all – our city is a lot more than that.’
Waters said receiving adequate funding for his force in recent years has been the key to their success in cracking down on violent crime.
‘As the city grows, this agency has to grow,’ he said.