On a weekday afternoon in mid-June, Minh Tran guides a late-model Infiniti through Northeast Dallas, checking in on his old haunts. The strip club on an otherwise semi-industrial stretch of Plano Road, unmarked save for its gaudy rows of palm trees, was a magnet for robberies and violence. The apartments…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, you may have heard, is “deeply concerned” about eXXXotica, the three-day porn expo that arrives in Dallas on Friday. Alas, he wrote in a letter to the Dallas Women’s Foundation, which had objected to the event taking place in the city-owned Convention Center, there was nothing…
It’s easy to get lost in all the affordable-housing stuff that’s been swirling around City Hall for the past couple of years. First HUD was really mad at Dallas over its housing policies, then it wasn’t, then the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs…
In 2001, under pressure from police and politicians, then-Dallas County District Attorney Bill Hill launched a highly publicized crackdown on illegal eight-liner parlors that had sprung up like ragweed in dingy storefronts in Dallas and suburbs. Toby Shook, a defense attorney and former prosecutor, remembers Hill assembling reporters at a…
Let’s give credit where credit is due. The Dallas Morning News has done a perfectly OK job of covering Sandra Bland’s questionable arrest and alleged suicide in a jail cell outside Houston. Even chronically wrong opinionaters (i.e. Tod Robberson) have managed to swallow their worst hot-take reflexes and compose thoughtful…
The so-called bike share program at Fair Park may be a scarcely utilized disaster. That doesn’t mean that a well-considered bike-share system, with stations placed strategically at points throughout the central city so riders can travel from where they are to a place they might want to go (rather than…
Uber and Lyft have been legally operating in Dallas for almost three months now. Uber was already dominating cabs in the competition for business trips, a trend that has only continued since the City Council’s new transportation-for-hire ordinance went into effect on April 30. Data on personal trips are harder to…
Big picture, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last month in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project shouldn’t change much. In endorsing disparate impact theory — the notion in civil rights law that a policy can be found illegally discriminatory through a statistical analysis of its effects…
Attention homosexuals, sodomites and godless cowards who, through misplaced compassion or cowed silence, abet the gay destruction of the American way of life. Christians are sick and tired of being bullied, and they’re not going to take it anymore. No doubt you’ve heard this rhetoric before. Lord knows there’s been…
In November 2014 Mayor Mike Rawlings braved a breath-catching chill and the self-defeating inadequacy of the notion that two isolated docking station could constitute a functioning system and enthusiastically kicked off a bike-sharing program at Fair Park. Rawlings gleefully hopped on one of the $8,000 bikes (the city paid $125,000…
When Dallas police arrived at Leonard Mornes’ Ledbetter Drive home at around 7 p.m. Wednesday night, the 60-year-old homeowner told them he’d caught the two dead women inside breaking into his house and shot them. Which, given the rights endowed upon property owners by God and the state of Texas,…
Evil is probably too strong an adjective for Time Warner. The company is not, at least so far as has been documented, propping up despotic regimes in Third World countries, pumping radioactive waste into baby formula or systematically clubbing baby seals; it merely delivers some of the most mind-bendingly atrocious customer…
The $125,000 bike-share program at Fair Park — those two forlorn rental kiosks that Mayor Mike Rawlings tried so ardently last November to make seem like a good idea — is, for all practical purposes, a city project. Rawlings, along with various members of city staff, pushed it as a way…
It’s probably fair to call Brett Sanders, like Kory Watkins, a provocateur — the nice word for troll — scheming to get police to act in a way that can go viral on YouTube. But whereas Watkins rushes to traffic stops and the like to aggressively videotape officers in action,…
Things have not been going well for Breitling Energy of late. In the third quarter of 2014 it suffered a reported loss of $759,229 which, hey, may have been a blip but we can’t be sure because that was the last financial report it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission even…
Surely you haven’t forgotten about the Texas Nationalist Movement? Their quest to secede from the United States so far has won little more than sarcastic newspaper headlines, all that was before Texas separatists had the tacit support of the Russian government. This news arrived via Politico, which read some tea leaves/Russian language newspapers…
In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 20 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Can Turkyilmaz. When Imam Zia Sheikh learned that two would-be jihadists had been gunned down outside a draw-the-prophet-Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland this May, he braced for…
This week we’re profiling 20 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from photographer Can Turkyilmaz. On a cool evening in March 2014, Dominique Alexander stood in front of A. Maceo Smith High School with scores of other mourners, candles guttering in the twilight. Nearby…
Governor Greg Abbott’, three weeks after effectively telling drug overdosers to drop dead by klling a bill to protect Good Samaritan 911 callers from prosecution for small-time drug possession, took another intexplicably regressive potshot at the Legislature’s attempts to make Texas’ criminal justice system just a bit more humane. Among the measures…
Martin Urbina told police he didn’t remember shooting his friend. The last he could recall, it was not long after midnight on Thursday and he and the friend, Gilberto Perez, were sitting on his West Dallas front porch. Perez walked to the side of the house to take a piss…
The corruption charges unveiled in New York last month against more than a dozen international soccer bigwigs shook FIFA to its core, but the long arm of American justice somehow missed longtime FIFA President Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, the world’s most notorious sportocrat. Those hoping that Blatter will experience a comeuppance…
It was a rough Monday night in Pleasant Grove. And by night we mean the 10-minute period between 11:30 and 11:40 p.m. And by Pleasant Grove we’re referring specifically to a half-mile stretch of Lawnview Avenue. According to police, there were three separate incidents, all involving guns: one attempted car…
