The council’s weekly crime report includes numbers through March 18 and shows a 45.6% reduction in homicide offenses year-over-year, which comes out to 25 fewer victims across Dallas. The year-to-date improvement is especially “shocking,” council member Cara Mendelsohn said, in light of the cumulative improvements the Dallas Police Department has made each of the last four years.
Dallas police reported 183 murders in 2024, an improvement from the 248 victims recorded the year prior and the city’s lowest victim count since 2018, when 159 murders were reported.
“It's not just a reduction of one year, it's on top of every year before it. When you start looking at the reduction in the number of victims, number of incidents, we clearly still have crime, but it is much lower than it had been,” Mendelsohn, who chairs the committee, said. “We have to at least celebrate that. … It's the officers who have done this work. It's [police] leadership that has made it happen.”
Nathan Swyers, major of the Dallas Police Department’s Violent Crime Division, added that murder case clearance rates currently sit above 53%, a 10% improvement from this time last year.
Assault data has also been improving this year. Over 150 fewer people have been victims of aggravated assaults year-to-date, with police recording a 17.5% reduction. The only category measured in the city’s violence crime reduction plan that has increased year-over-year in 2025 is business robberies, which also follows a trend that started last year.
The Waiting Game
Police dispatch call and response times are behind last year’s, in some cases by nearly an hour.Dallas police sort 911 reports into four ranking levels, with top-priority calls receiving the quickest dispatch and response times. Priority one calls include reports of shootings, robberies in progress and kidnappings, and they are averaging an 11.29-minute response time so far this year, DPD data shows. This time last year, however, those calls averaged a 9.74-minute response time.
Priority 2 calls, which include reports of suicide, major car accidents and animal cruelty in progress, now average a 91.62-minute response time compared with 68.38 minutes last year. Random gunfire, drug houses, prostitution and dead person calls are sorted into the third priority level, which averages 234.56 minutes, or nearly four hours, for a response. Last year, priority three calls were generally answered within 196.10 minutes.
Priority four calls have seen the most significant increase in wait time. Now, calls regarding noise complaints, vehicle burglaries or fireworks receive a 275.09 response time, compared with 219.36 minutes in 2024.
Interim police Chief Michael Igo told the council that the police department is conducting several internal reviews to shorten response times. The department is reevaluating the types of calls sorted into the priority one category, and a third-party vendor is sorting through division-specific call data, Igo said. He added that the third-party review should be completed within a few weeks.
“I will just point out that while the number of sworn officers is up, actually the number of patrol officers is down,” Mendelsohn said, referencing staffing data that shows 25 fewer DPD officers are in patrol units compared with a year ago. “That's who's actually answering the calls … people are still waiting for an officer to show up, I think that's the tension.”
In closing the briefing, Igo said he had temporarily halted department transfers to ensure “proper and adequate staffing across the patrol divisions.”
