It took Dallas almost two years to get the results of the police staffing study it commissioned from KPMG, one of the world’s biggest auditing firms. Judging from what DPD brass told members of the City Council on Monday, actually making any hay from the study’s conclusions is going to…
The task ahead of Texas Democrats is like the one Dirk Nowitzki and the rest of the 2010-11 Mavericks faced before that season’s playoffs: monumental, but squarely within the realm of possibility. The rewards are similar too, for both groups, should they find success. The Mavs turned back the tide…
The Supreme Court issued a ruling that allows a new immigration restriction to go into effect until a lawsuit against the rule is decided.
At a little after 8:30 p.m. Thursday, Ben Bailey stood at the edge of a grove of trees above Cottonwood Creek, where a muddy, plywood-covered path curved around into the woods. “Hello!” Bailey called out, over the roar of traffic nearby on U.S. Highway 75. At first, no one answered,…
We have to stop being played for suckers on race, crime and poverty, both here in Dallas and as a nation. Take murder. In recent weeks, two significant local studies and one exciting policy proposal have come forward to combat the social and moral dysfunction that drive murder in particular…
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, protector of the Texas Senate, is prepared to rewrite one of the chamber’s oldest rules for the second time in less than a decade. Speaking Thursday on a panel presented by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, Patrick said he will have the votes necessary…
We probably should have seen it coming. Impeachment is an arcane, anachronistic and deeply partisan process, so of course it’s right up Ivy League nerd Ted Cruz’s alley. Despite lamenting the impeachment process since its specter was raised this fall, Cruz has taken every opportunity afforded him to present himself…
Let me just give you a quick current example of how we get screwed up in this town. This Tuesday, DART, the regional transit agency, had to eat crow and go back to the drawing board on a new $1.25 billion rail line through North Dallas after both City Council…
In 2011, Texas booted Planned Parenthood from the state’s Women’s Health Program, starving the family-planning provider from federal Medicaid funds. Almost half of Planned Parenthood’s Texas clinics closed, depriving many in the state of critical medical care. Two years later, the federal government cut off funding to the program, because…
For one minute, let’s not call it the murder problem. The word, murder, makes people understandably crazy. Let’s go easy on the murder and just call it the general social messed-up-edness problem or GSMP instead. Better? We now have two recent independent reports on GSMP, one assembled by the administration…
Dallas Area Rapid Transit promised Tuesday to alter plans for its new rail line after two North Dallas council members objected to an updated design that would elevate portions of the track. Planners had proposed raising the entire track 5 feet, saving at least $10 million and limiting construction impacts…
There’s something about public memorials Dallas can’t get quite right. Sure, Robert E. Lee has been kicked out of Turtle Creek Park, but the traitorous general’s fellow travelers are still standing, albeit shielded from public view, on Pioneer Plaza near City Hall. Efforts to take down both memorials to treason…
They should just come out and say it. Everything would be so much easier if Texas Republicans would just admit what they, their constituents and their fellow travelers know to be true: They don’t care whether President Donald Trump did what he’s alleged to have done in the articles of…
Stripped of specific context, Thursday’s events in Washington were remarkable. Ninety-nine U.S. senators — Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe was absent, dealing with a loved one’s medical emergency — swore an oath promising to impartially weigh whether President Donald Trump’s conduct merits his being removed from office. It’s historic, only the third…
Lawyers for the city of Dallas and Yvette Gbalazeh have agreed to settle the activist’s 2018 lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the city’s panhandling ordinances. Gbalazeh said she will receive $20,000 and a meeting with the city’s police chief. She said the settlement sends a message: “There’s going to be consequences…
It doesn’t take a particularly good memory to remember when Dallas had a problem with loose dogs. A crisis is probably a more accurate way to describe it. A 2016 study found that there were literally thousands of loose dogs roaming the streets of southern Dallas contributing to a spike…
When the Observer first reported on the burgeoning “sanctuary cities” for the unborn movement last summer, the whole thing seemed like a sideshow. Waskom, a town smack-dab in the middle of Gohmertland in East Texas, banned abortion clinics within its city limits. The town based its decision on the fact that,…
In early 2018, the city released a plan to build thousands of new units of affordable housing. When the plan was introduced, then-Mayor Mike Rawlings said, “This is a very important day to show that government works in America, and we can take complex issues and get 15 of us…
I’m struggling through a bunch of dense academic articles and data about crime and social equity for a column I’m working on that I’m sure no one including my loved ones will ever read — well, they don’t really read my stuff anyway — because I think writing stuff that no one can stand…
One of Dallas’ oddest but still really consequential fights limped through another round at City Hall on Tuesday, as city staff, council members and advocates for the homeless pushed, pulled and tugged at a proposed ordinance that will finally codify just who, and who isn’t, allowed to provide shelter for…
Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision last week to reject all new refugees to the state of Texas has left Dallas area refugee and immigrant organizations confused and frustrated but committed to reversing the decision. “We’re in the largest refugee crisis since the Holocaust, and in response to that our country is…
When Donna Pryor walked into her new three-bedroom home on a tree-lined street in Plano, she was mesmerized. There was a clean yard, a huge kitchen and a swimming pool out back. Finally, her children would be safe. Pryor left home when she was 13 to escape her drug-addicted mother. Pregnant…
