Down at city hall today, they are haggling over pay raises for Dallas cops. Certainly those raises are well-deserved, and it is difficult to argue against them after what happened in this city over the summer. But it’s also a good time to remember that 2016 has been a tough year for Dallas crime. While overall crime is down around 4 percent, the murder rate has spiked by 20 percent.
A lot of that is because of a crazy spate of murders last March, which prompted Chief Brown to ramp up the activities of the violent crime task force. Since then the murder rate has slowed. Still, that spike was enough to place Dallas in an elite circle of cities with the highest murder rate increases from 2015-2016, according to a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice.
Other cities with large bumps in the murder rate include Chicago, Las Vegas, San Diego, and San Jose. And while Dallas’ increase is less than those other four cities, where our fair burg stands out is in how much Dallas’ poverty rate exceeds the national average. Dallas poverty rates exceed the national average by 62.7 percent, which is about 10 percentage points higher than Baltimore, Chicago, and Houston. (H/T CityLab).
