Known as “Operation Shut Down Corner,” the raid announced on Wednesday included more than 150 agents and officers from the North Texas OCDE (Organized Crime Drug Enforcement) Strike Force, the Department of Justice in North Texas said in a press release.
Although 21 people were charged, one of the accused individuals was still on the run. The crimes they’re facing are steep: conspiracy to distribute an array of drugs, maintaining drug-involved premises and possession of firearms to further drug trafficking crimes, among others.
Some of those charged could end up in prison for up to four decades, the DOJ said. Many of them have long rap sheets, including making terroristic threats, weapon possession, drug possession, aggravated assault and others.
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Hamilton Park is a historically Black neighborhood in North Dallas with upward of 10,000 residents. The feds say the Hamilton Park Posse had “terrorized” the area for years.
“This drug trafficking, gun wielding street gang has been terrorizing their neighborhood for far too long,” U.S. Attorney Chad Meacham said at a press conference with the Drug Enforcement Agency on Wednesday.
DEA Special Agent in Charge Eduardo Chavez said at the press conference: “The Hamilton Park area of Dallas was once described to me as a ‘Forgotten Neighborhood.’ That stops now.”
During the early months of the pandemic, crime surged in Dallas and other cities around the country. In 2021, however, homicides in Dallas slumped by 13%, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Last June, hundreds of FBI agents raided an apartment complex in South Dallas and arrested at least 10 people allegedly affiliated with a gang called the Park Row Posse. The DOJ later said that nobody lived in the apartment complex, and that law enforcement had seized 36 guns, $58,000 in cash, six vehicles and dozens of pounds of drugs.
In July, federal agents and local police seized $1.6 million in cash, 14 firearms and large quantities of cocaine and methamphetamine at a southeast Dallas home.
