Police & Law Enforcement

Less than a month since an unarmed, black teen — with no criminal record and every right to be in a gated Florida neighborhood — was shot to death by some repeat 911 dialer and crime watch volunteer named George Zimmerman, we’ve been collectively stunned by the fact that the…

On Tuesday night, state Senator Wendy Davis’ staff announced that someone had set a small fire outside the door of her Fort Worth office using bottles filled with lighter fluid. The senator wasn’t there at the time, and no one else was hurt during the incident, which badly scorched the…

Our friend Daniel Rodrigue, once a writer here and now a journalism teacher at DCCCD’s Brookhaven College, sent word this morning that one of his students, Derek Madrigal, was the victim of a vicious beating on the beaches of South Padre Island over spring break. The story is popping up…

Late last night, police say, four strangers broke into the home of a southern Dallas man looking to rob the house. They wound up killing him — in front of the man’s daughter. Jesse Barragan, 54, was in his bedroom when the men — three of them black, one Latino…

Back in February, when the Greenville Avenue St. Patrick’s Day Parade on was still on alleged life support, one of the rising costs cited by cash-strapped organizers was the police presence. A growing parade meant a growing need for cops on the streets, and that meant a parade budget that…

Those lucky Dallasites who tuned in to KDFW Fox 4’s 9 p.m. news last night got a little something extra, but it wasn’t the exclusive — and entirely banal — footage of Dallas police arresting a Dallas firefighter at his home. It was the tap-dance routine that followed (and which…

Surprise! And by that we mean in a development that’s no surprise at all to anyone, DPD just sent out a news release announcing that they’ll be conducting another No Refusal DWI Initiative this weekend: This initiative will begin at 6:00 P.M., Friday, March 16, 2012 and will end at…

Around 2 a.m. yesterday morning, two men were walking near the corner of Audelia Road and Forest Lane in northeast Dallas when, according to police, a dark four-door car, adorned with tinted windows and 24-inch rims, approached them slowly. There were five or six black men inside, all thought to…

Update: Cannon has resigned. More after the original story. Original item: The folks from the Dallas Police vice squad had an interesting Thursday, going undercover at the apparently lovably bizarre King Spa and Sauna. And they netted themselves an interesting fish: Scott Cannon III, a longtime Duncanville city councilman with…

At around 9:05 Wednesday night, Dallas police say, Luis Escalante, 23, and Carlos Cipriano, 37, approached a customer in front of Smoke For Less in the 2900 block of Esters Boulevard in northwest Irving, brandished a weapon — possibly a pellet gun — and made off with a vehicle equipped…

It was a hold-up. If any of Tim Moore’s 16 coworkers at Oshman’s Sporting Goods in Irving made a wrong move on Christmas Eve of 2000, someone would die. The group of men posing as ADT security personnel ordered employees to line up with their hands on the counter. They…

It’s been more than three months since Seth Winder lost his tenuous grip on sanity in a Denton County courtroom, forcing Judge Bruce McFarling to declare a mistrial even as the prosecution prepared to wrap its case. Winder, a 32-year-old homeless man from The Colony, is accused of murdering and…

Scanning the city’s inscrutable bids website this morning in the hopes of finding that not-there-yet Dallas Farmers Market RFP, I came across this instead: a 102-page request for proposals from the Dallas Police Department, which is looking to significantly step up its arsenal of video surveillance cameras. As in: Just…

It’s been 11 years since George Rivas lead the Texas Seven in their escape from prison and shooting of a police officer, and the hour of his death is fast-approaching. At around 6 p.m, the State of Texas will end his life by lethal injection. Rivas confessed that he was…

When the U.S. Attorney’s Office unsealed the indictment yesterday alleging that Dr. Jacques Roy spearheaded the largest healthcare fraud in the nation’s history out of his DeSoto office, they revealed that in 2010, he dispatched recruiters to The Bridge downtown. Their mission: pay homeless Medicaid beneficiaries $50 a pop to…

We received a release this morning from the U.S. Attorney’s Office inviting us to a noon-thirty press conference at the Earle Cabell, at which time U.S. Attorney Sarah Saldaña, Deputy Attorney General James Cole and a host of other federal officials would address “a major health care fraud enforcement action.”…

As Leslie noted yesterday, in her piece about Judge Andy Chatham finally, officially declaring Richard Miles innocent two years after he was let out of prison, Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins noted, out of nowhere, that his great-grandfather had been executed by the state of Texas. The DA, a…

The video you see above was taken in the wee small hours of Saturday morning at the 7-Eleven located at 5123 W. Lovers Lane, just off Inwood — you know, the one next to Neighborhood Services, which, according to Dallas PD records, has been robbed more than 70 times in…

Last night, on WFAA, Byron Harris reported: “DART says it doesn’t have enough police to put an officer on every train, but it is trying to place uniformed officers on platforms, where they can be seen.” But then, this morning, this from The Dallas Morning News: “‘Effective today, there’s a…

A couple of years back Scott Goldstein wrote quite the flattering profile of Dallas Police Assistant Chief Floyd Simpson — as in, “In a profession that demands toughness, Simpson embodies compassion.” Simpson was former Chief David Kunkle’s right-hand man — the man Kunkle put in charge of the Patrol Division,…

It’s that time of the year — time for the Dallas Police Department to release its annual by-the-numbers breakdown of traffic stops officers made in 2011. Chief  David Brown himself will go to City Hall today to present the council’s Public Safety Committee with the 2011 Dallas Police Department Traffic…