The Dallas Police Department provides local law enforcement services for the city of Dallas, Texas. The DPD is led by a Chief of Police, a position appointed by the city manager, who is in turn appointed by the Dallas City Council. The official Dallas Police Department website can be found at dallaspolice.net and provides links to a wide variety of useful information.
DPD’s operations
The DPD’s operations are divided into geographical regions of Dallas, each overseen by a deputy chief of police. The seven geographical subdivisions of the DPD are North Central, Central, South Central, Southwest, Northeast, Northwest, and Southeast. Each of these are further subdivided into regions known as beats, each with their own substations. In addition to providing patrol services for their beats, each substation maintains an investigative unit tasked with addressing thefts and burglaries that occur within their jurisdictions.
The DPD also has divisions tasked with investigating specific kinds of crime. Narcotics deals with the illegal drug trade and is subdivided into units based on the “level” of the drug trade, these being Street Level Enforcement Units, Mid and Upper Level Enforcement Units (which target the distributors that supply the street level dealers), Federal Task Force Units (which works with the DEA, the ATF and other Federal Task Forces), and Interdiction Units (assigned to Love Field Airport, bus terminals, and Amtrak and includes the division’s K-9 units).
The Crime Against Persons division handles assaults, robbery, homicide, special investigations, and crime scene response. Auto Theft handles vehicular theft cases. Youth operations handles cases involving children including child abuse, child exploitation, missing children, and gang related child issues. Other divisions include the Property unit (handling property crimes), the Computer Crimes Team, Internal Affairs, Financial Investigations, Family Violence, Mounted Unit, and the Love Field Unit (stationed at Love Field Airport).
The City of Dallas, Texas has an estimated population of 1,241,491 residents and experiences an estimated annual average of 63,521 crimes. Violent crimes account for around 13 percent of those crimes with murders at 154 (0.12 per 1000 residents), rapes at 491 (0.40 per 1000 residents), robberies at 4,098 (3.30 per 1000 residents), and assaults at 3,650 (2.94 per 1000 residents) for a grand total of 8,393 violent crimes per annum (6.76 per 1000 residents). Property crimes account for the other 87 percent of those crimes with burglaries at 16,106 (12.97 per 1000 residents), thefts at 31,925 (25.72 per 1000 residents), and motor vehicle thefts at 7097 (5.72 per 1000 residents) for a grand total of 55,128 property crimes per annum (44.41 per 1000 residents). A resident of Dallas, Texas has a 1 in 148 chance of becoming a victim of a violent crime and a 1 in 23 chance of becoming a victim of a property crime each year.
Should you need to request public records, information on how to request it can be found at policereports.dallaspolice.net. There you will find online forms or contact information for requesting Offense Incidents records, 911 call records, arrest records, accident reports, Open Records, and street search.
In you are looking for information about a person or persons who may currently be incarcerated in the city jail, you can perform a search for them at dallascounty.org/jaillookup/search.jsp. There you will find three options for performing your search. Two of them are quite simple, allowing you to search for information about the inmate by Case Number or Booking Number. The third is useful if you do not have either of the former relevant numbers and allows you to search by filling in fields for last name, first name, date of birth, race, and sex. The name fields will locate records from even partial spelling, so it is probably best to only include those parts of the name for which you are sure of the spelling.
Information such as crime rates, crime reports, as well as an interactive crime map and other resources about crime in Dallas can be found at dallaspolice.net/dpd_crimereport.html.