Business robberies are up over 60% in Dallas.
At Monday's Public Safety Committee meeting, the Dallas Police Department announced that while overall violent crime is down from a year ago, business robberies are up about 64%.
“Approximately 41% of these crimes begin as a theft shoplifting incident in which someone enters a retail store and attempts to remove merchandise without paying, followed by a store employee attempting to stop the incident at some point. and attempted to intervene, and was assaulted,” said Maj. Jason Scoggins.
He claimed that the remaining 59% of business robberies were committed by “three different groups of serial robbers hitting different areas of Dallas.”
“It's not like a bunch of people robbing a store at gunpoint. … It's actually a small group of people going out and stealing some of these things. [businesses] I was held at gunpoint,” Scoggins said.
DPD said the increase included 41 total crimes, an increase of 16 from the previous year.
But City Councilwoman and Public Safety Committee Chair Kara Mendelsohn (Ward 12) said more attention needs to be paid to reducing violent crime overall.
“We don't want 16 more business robberies across our metropolis. But we always want to hear a 29% reduction in violent crime,” she said. “We're talking about an almost 30 percent reduction in violent crime, and we just don't want it to turn into another conversation where we're fixated on 16 business crimes.”
Still, even though a city report recommends about 4,000 officers to ensure public safety, DPD currently only has about 3,000 sworn officers, so crime continues to rise in Dallas. is the main problem.
Related: Officials have budgeted only about $654 million for the Dallas Police Department this fiscal year, which is lower than other crime-prone cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City, which has a lower budget for public safety. chose to spend far less of their tax dollars. The Dallas City Council adopted the budget despite DPD's officer shortage.
The effects of the police shortage are also being felt in downtown Dallas. The city center has a much higher crime rate than Fort Worth's downtown area, and is reportedly patrolled by a dedicated neighborhood police force working in conjunction with private security.
As previously reported, dallas expressCity Councilwoman Janie Schultz's 11th District saw robberies increase by more than 100% in 2024 compared to the previous year, but data from Dallas' Crime Analytics Dashboard shows that crimes were committed against individuals or businesses. It is not specified whether this was done against.
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