Dallas Police Department sees some improvements, but struggles with response time in September, report
Dallas, TX – On the monthly Public Safety Committee meeting that will take place on Tuesday, Dallas Police Department will provide some reports and updates about their work during September.
According to DPD reports, there are some improvements in their work, but also some things that the department should work on.
In the reports, DPD say that the overall crime rate in the city is down 5.8% through September compared to the same time last year. What is even more important for the department and the public safety, the number of robberies in the city is down for 26%, while the number of sex offense cases is down for 35%.
What comes a worrying thing is the fact that Dallas police now need more time to respond to Priority 1 calls. That said, Dallas officers averaged 8 minutes, 12 seconds to arrive at the scene after the dispatch receive a call for the most serious category of crimes.
In September last year, the department needed 7 minutes, 46 seconds on average, which is 26 seconds less compared to this year’s results.
As we already reported multiple times in regards to the incident, Dallas Police Department lost more than 20 terabytes of valuable data meaning that 8.7 million individual files were delated forever.
The department has been working on recovering the files, but they managed to recover only 140,353 files so far. The department will continue to work on files recovery in the upcoming period.
The police department exceeded its hiring goals for the 2020-2021 fiscal year. The goal had been to hire 150 new police officers. The department hired 169 new officers. But it lost 205 officers to attrition, so it sustained a net loss of 36 police officers over that time.
The department also struggles with 911 dispatchers. Currently, the Dallas Police Department has 111 911 dispatchers, 33 of whom are newly hired trainees. The department is allowed to have 141 dispatchers.