Violent crime drops in top 10 largest US city as police use grids to target worst offenders

The Dallas Police Department saw a drop in violent crime in 2024 by implementing proven strategies to proactively fight crime in Texas.

Interim Chief of Police Michael Igo told Fox News Digital that its violent crime reduction efforts resulted in both fewer incidents and fewer victims throughout 2024.

"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 said. "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."

Dallas is one of two cities among the country's largest dozen cities, along with Texas neighbor Fort Worth, that is led by a Republican mayor.

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In October 2024, Michael Igo was appointed as interim chief of police of the Dallas Police Department, the ninth-largest police department in the country. (Dallas Police Department)

Data-driven results

Igo explained that the city gathered information on where violent crime and nonviolent crime occurred and created 300-by-300-yard grids in Dallas that police say experience disproportionate levels of crime.

"On that data, we worked together on putting together a crime plan where our grids were identified," he said. "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 said. 

He said that over the last three years the Dallas Police Department has worked to address individuals who have "shown the most propensity to commit crimes in those areas."

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Crime dropped in Dallas in 2024 thanks to a three-pronged strategy, the interim police chief said. (iStock)

The PNI aspect of the strategy refers to an approach that focuses on "the spatial distribution of crime in communities and the role of unguarded places used by individuals and criminal networks to facilitate crime," DPD said on its website.

That involves traditional police enforcement efforts, such as arrests and controlled drug purchases, as well as actions to "alter the criminogenic nature" of those places, including code enforcement, abatement, environmental design changes, disorder-focused efforts (graffiti abatement, trash clean up, abandoned vehicle removal, weed/brush removal) and other strategies.

Igo said they took a holistic look at how crime was affecting the community, engaging with non-governmental organizations.

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"We provided services, whether it was job service, drug rehabilitation services, and try to get them to remove themselves from that crime element," he said.

In 2024, Dallas recorded 183 homicides. (Fox News)

By the numbers

The Dallas Police Department reported an 8.2% decrease in violent crime across the city in 2024, including a 26% reduction in murders compared to the previous year.

The decline in homicides represents 65 fewer murder victims than in 2023, bringing the city's murder rate to its lowest level since before the pandemic, according to data released by DPD. 

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"When you start saying 26% reduction in murders, but then you say that's 65 less people that died this year in Dallas," Council Member Cara Mendelsohn said, according to the Dallas Observer. "That's incredible!"