Dallas police Chief Eddie García joined the mayor and other city leaders Monday to unveil a plan to reorganize the department’s family violence unit to confront an increase in domestic aggravated assaults.
The strategy includes resuming visits to the homes of vulnerable survivors and increasing collaboration between homicide and intimate-partner violence detectives.
“This is a step in the right direction,” García said. “And certainly, still, we’ll have limitations, but certainly this is a model that we’ll be following from here on out.”
Although violent crime citywide was down about 6% during the first half of the year, aggravated assaults — family and non-family — have been on the rise.
Police officials have said the chief’s overall violent crime plan isn’t designed to address domestic-related aggravated assaults because its strategy is focused on street-level offenses, not those committed in homes.
From January to August, family-related aggravated assaults were up about 7.7%, with 1,090 incidents, compared with 1,012 last year, according to department statistics. The uptick follows a year in which felony domestic violence assaults had spiked about 13.6%.
City officials said COVID-19 may be to blame, at least in part, for the rise.
Mayor Eric Johnson, who joined García on Monday, along with City Council member Adam McGough, said stay-at-home orders and the economic fallout of the pandemic strained families in 2020.
He said that police alone can’t reduce the violence and that there’s a heavy reliance on private organizations and the judicial system “to step up to help the victims.”
“At times domestic violence can seem to be too complicated and too intractable of a problem for us to solve,” Johnson said. “But we can’t throw up our hands and say that it’s someone else’s responsibility.”
Under the new plan, the department will add five detectives and one sergeant to the domestic violence unit, which is staffed by 40 sworn and non-sworn members. Police Lt. Kylee Hawks said the department plans to increase staffing even further in “the near future as well.”
Hawks, the commander of the department’s domestic violence unit, said police have investigated nearly 13,000 family violence offenses from July 1, 2020, to June 30 of this year. She said three-quarters of them related to intimate-partner violence, rather than other family violence such as child abuse, so the majority of the reorganized unit will concentrate on those offenses.
She said police will conduct more home visits with The Family Place, a social services organization that helps victims of domestic violence, to increase police visibility and provide resources to victims who have been determined to be at high risk.
Homicide detectives also will now respond with an intimate-partner violence detective whenever a murder might involve family violence.
Since 2018, family violence has accounted for between 10% and 14% of Dallas homicides annually. And last year, about 25% of the 8,048 aggravated assault cases involved family members or intimate partners.
Former City Council member Jennifer Staubach Gates, who serves as chairwoman of the Mayor’s Domestic Violence Advisory Council, said the chances of fatalities decline when high-risk families interact with advocates or law enforcement. She lauded the new plan and said COVID-19 threw a wrench into domestic violence reports because victims were often sheltered at home with offenders.
García said that his department needs to focus equally on victims and offenders and that police will follow a focused deterrence approach, which involves reaching out to people who “would be susceptible to a life of crime.”
That approach is also part of García’s overall violent crime plan, which aims to change the behavior of high-risk offenders through arrests, social services and community involvement.
“It isn’t about making more arrests, it’s about solving the problem and ensuring that we don’t have victimization of our city,” the chief said. “And so that, in a general sense, is what our focused deterrence model is based on. Not just for domestic violence, but as we start rolling out into other areas of non-family violence related aggravated assaults in our city as well.”
Police request high bail and electronic leg monitoring for domestic violence offenders to keep track of them, and also seek emergency protective orders for victims.
Because recidivism is high in domestic violence cases, García said partnerships with federal agencies, Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot’s office and other parts of the justice system are important.
“I can control what I can control here,” García said. “I can’t control the district attorney’s office, although I know that we have the commitment from D.A. Creuzot on this issue, I know it’s important to him as well, but I know certainly he doesn’t have control of the judges either, so I’m certainly hopeful that we can all see how important this is.”
Family violence cases were among the 8 million files of Dallas police evidence deleted when a now-fired city IT employee failed to follow procedures while transferring data. But García said police haven’t yet found a case that was affected by the loss, adding that the department is “hopeful that the redundancy that we have in place” will reduce the likelihood of any domestic violence cases being affected.
“I’m not saying that there isn’t any potential for that, but as of today we haven’t had a single case affected,” he said.
Looking forward, he noted that his new plan is “a living document” that can be adapted to the city of Dallas, and is only “one component of a systemwide approach required to address the needs of victims, hold offenders accountable and reduce the structural conditions associated with domestic violence.”
He said he recognizes that the department needs to do a better job of tracking recommendations and identifying any potential problems with implementing them.
“This is about how can we do a better job and how can we ensure that our survivors know that we have their back and this is going to be an ongoing thing,” García said.
