Crime & Police

As the Dallas Police Department continues to fight high attrition rates and low staffing levels, department officials said Monday they want to get rid of one of DPD’s most onerous requirements for new recruits. Assuming the Dallas City Council signs off on the change, the department will take on recruits…

Dallas confronts an enormous moral and psychological challenge in the case of former Dallas police Officer Amber Guyger, charged with murder in the shooting death of Botham Jean, a young accountant killed Sept. 6 in his own apartment. This is one we have to get right, and it won’t be…

A Dallas County Grand Jury indicted former Dallas Police Department Officer Amber Guyger on murder charges related to her shooting and killing her neighbor, Botham Jean, in early September. Guyger shot Jean in his apartment, believing he was a burglar.  Guyger entered Jean’s apartment on Sept. 6 after completing her…

A 32-year-old Dallas Police Department senior corporal has been arrested on revenge porn charges, DPD announced in a brief statement Thursday. Tarrant County authorities have charged Alexander Cleland with Unlawful Disclosure or Promotion of Intimate Visual Material, a Class A misdemeanor. Cleland turned himself in to Tarrant County officials in Keller…

After more than a year of makeshift enforcement for crimes like gambling and prostitution, the Dallas Police Department is finally set to roll out its reconstituted vice unit later this week, Assistant Chief Paul Stokes said Monday. Twenty-one officers will staff the new unit, three-quarters of the number that worked…

We have one of those doorbells you can see out of. You know what I mean. With a TV camera in it? You can talk to people through your doorbell. We were early adopters. When we first got our two-way doorbell, they were still fairly uncommon. We could still get…

Call it wild speculation, but I think we’ve just been struggling as a community to figure out the wildly troubling case of Amber Guyger and Botham Jean, a terrible event in which a white Dallas cop shot and killed an innocent black man in his own apartment last Sept. 6…

A little more than two months after activists shut down a Dallas City Council meeting while calling for police reform following an officer’s killing an unarmed man in his own apartment, the city has plans for a toughened up Citizens Review Board for the police department. According to a memo…

North Richland Hills, The Colony, Wichita Falls and Archer City all have been recent targets of flyers by Patriot Front, a Texas-based white supremacist group. Some of the flyers say, “Keep America American” and encourage people to report “any and all illegal aliens,” calling them criminals. Some are as inconspicuous…

Irving Police Chief Jeff Spivey paid a visit to the Islamic Center of Irving recently to talk about the legality of reporting child sexual abuse after allegations of child molestation rocked the North Texas Muslim community last week. Spivey said he went to the Irving Mosque to discuss the duty…

Dallas Police Chief U. Renee Hall fired police Maj. LaToya Porter on Thursday afternoon following a yearlong investigation into misconduct by Porter related to the department’s sergeant’s exam. Porter helped the department create the exam and operated a test-preparation company that charged fees to train officers hoping to take the…

The Florida man alleged to have sent pipe bombs to President Donald Trump’s political opponents and critics around the country threatened U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke earlier this year, his campaign confirmed to the Observer on Wednesday afternoon. “We received Facebook messages from [Cesar] Sayoc threatening Beto in April,” O’Rourke…

After hearing three days of witnesses and arguments, a Dallas County jury took less than four hours to sentence a Dallas man to death for shooting a dentist in the head as part of a plot allegedly conceived by the dentist’s boyfriend’s jilted former girlfriend. Brenda Delgado allegedly paid Kristopher…

An Airbnb horror story came to life in Dallas earlier this month, when a Richardson woman says she was harassed by a man whom she hosted in her apartment through the app. Alavia Khawaja, 24, says she hosted Airbnb guest Leonard Jackson on Oct. 11. She had been renting space…

If you did what I do for a living, you might get a little down-in-the-mouth once in a while, too. But I want you to know that I also get wonderfully optimistic about where the city is headed. That’s what this will be about, after I get done whining and…

After less than three hours of deliberation Thursday afternoon, a Dallas County jury convicted Kristopher Love, 34, for the 2015 murder of Dallas dentist Kendra Hatcher. Prosecutors in the case successfully argued that Love took drugs and cash from Brenda Delgado in exchange for shooting Hatcher in the head as…

Let me ask you something. Do you remember ever reading a column by Jim Schutze in which I said that I was a prince? Yes or no. Did I say that? Did I put myself up as some kind of knight in shining armor on a white horse? On a…

A little over a year ago, Kaitlin Bolger was in jail for gun smuggling — a felony in Texas. She was released in April 2017 and was expected to re-integrate into society with the mismatched men’s clothes on her back and a $50 check that she received upon release. “I…

A day before the voter registration deadline for the midterms, state Sen. Don Huffines issued a demand for an “emergency” Texas Senate committee hearing on voter registration fraud, particularly the rampant, unprosecuted cases of immigrants registering and voting illegally. At least Huffines seems to think it’s rampant, but then he…

Monday I wrote a column saying there is a chance under the law that fired Dallas police Officer Amber Guyger, who shot and killed an innocent man in his own apartment on Sept. 6, is not guilty of murder. The reader response was numerous and mostly angry with me, as…