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A year ago, Eddie Garcia was still going through the vetting process to be the next Dallas police chief when he phoned a San Antonio professor he\u2019d gotten to know during his four years as chief of the San Jose Police Department in California.<\/p>\n
If Garcia got the Dallas gig, he knew violent crime reduction would have to be his primary focus, coming off a year in 2020 where homicides spiked in Dallas by 23 percent<\/a>. He wanted to come in armed with new ideas and asked Michael <\/strong>Smith, professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Texas at San Antonio who had done previous research for the San Jose PD,<\/strong> to help draw up a plan.<\/p>\n \u201cMy goal, when we put that together was for it to bring together the best of what we know, from a research and evidence standpoint, about how the police can best control crime in urban areas,\u201d Smith told the editorial board this week.<\/p>\n Garcia got the job, and the result of their collaboration was implemented in May: first, to use data to map out roughly 50 micro locations \u2014 \u201chot spots\u201d in police parlance \u2014 in Dallas that produced the highest volume of violent street crime. Second, to flood the dangerous areas with a consistent police presence. And third, rather than employ dragnet or stop-and-frisk tactics, to focus on the surveillance, deterrence and arrest of repeat violent offenders, ferreting out guns and drug activity in particular.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n