Neighborhoods Partner With Law Enforcement For National Night Out Tuesday, Oct. 4

An armed man was fatally shot by Dallas police after firing a handgun early Wednesday morning in a residential area on Shiloh Road in the Casa View neighborhood of East Dallas. 

It wasn’t far from the Little Casa View neighborhood where Lisa Kelly has been planning a National Night Out block party with fellow members of the neighborhood association. 

The nationwide event National Night Out is advertised as a community-building campaign that promotes police-community partnerships, an attempt to build trust before a crime occurs. 

Kelly, president of the Little Casa View Neighborhood Association and a resident there since 2008, said events like National Night Out help neighborhoods establish a relationship with the police officers who patrol the streets where they live. 

Neighborhoods host block parties and cookouts to get to know each other. Officers with the police department, code enforcement, and other neighborhood divisions stop by to meet the residents and play with the kids. 

More than 90 neighborhoods have registered National Night Out events scheduled this year throughout the city, said Kristin Lowman, Dallas Police Department’s assistant director for public information.

“Community policing is being proactive and focusing on how, together, we can be a part of the solution,” Lowman said. “This requires us to work with different communities, businesses, community leaders, and faith-based [organizations] to be successful in that goal. Building relationships, building trust, and being involved with and in our community makes for a safer city.”

The Shiloh Road shooting is still under investigation, but neighbors speculate that maybe if the armed man had a pre-existing relationship with Dallas police officers, the incident might have ended differently.

“We’ve been doing National Night Out since about 2014,” Kelly said. “It sounds cliche, but it gives the neighbors an opportunity to interact with police and code enforcement. Last year the youth organization came out. Our council member Paula Blackmon has attended several times.” 

When such relationships are forged before a problem occurs, it’s easier to reach out to a police officer or council member when something bad happens, Kelly said of Little Casa View, which has about 3,000 residents.

“Our crime stats are pretty low,” Kelly said. “We have the catalytic converter [theft] problem, some stolen vehicles, and some attempted break-ins. Our neighborhood patrol officer Gabe Ortiz comes to our meetings every other month, and he sometimes contacts me to put out a notice to the neighborhood.” 

Low-income, high-crime neighborhoods and multifamily developments that could drastically benefit from building relationships with police aren’t traditionally well-organized and don’t get together for National Night Out, city officials say. 

Those who don’t have an organized event in their area are invited to a free community block party from 5 to 8 p.m. Oct. 4 at Dallas Police Headquarters, 1400 Botham Jean Blvd. 

Community Policing

Kelly and others in her neighborhood took the police department’s  Volunteers in Patrol (VIP) course to learn how to spot and report crime. 

“We’re kind of the eyes and ears for the DPD in our neighborhood,” she said. “Because you’re a VIP, it bumps you up to the top of the list for response.”

The Dallas Police Department’s Violent Crime Reduction Plan states that violent crime rose almost 22 percent over a three-year period from 2018 to 2020.

Police Chief Eddie Garcia has said that relationships and trust are the cornerstones of his community policing strategy. 

“The city has taken the proactive stance of increased visibility and engagement in low-income and underserved areas of our city through an increase in community events, social service access, and by conducting warrant service against known violent offenders that negatively affect the safety of our residents,” said Jennifer Brown, the city’s manager of public information. “Community policing strategies also are most effective when the environment is positively influenced.” 

To that end, the city’s Office of Integrated Public Safety Solutions has led an effort to install more than 4,000 lighting upgrades in areas known to have high night-time crime, Brown said. 

“Our collaborative Risk Terrain team identifies blight and dispatches mowing teams to care for vacant lots, board up vacant properties, and remove illegal dumping in a joint effort to create trust with the public and beautify the community.” 

The Dallas City Council passed a $4.75 billion budget last week that included funding for 250 new police officers.

‘Everybody Knows Everybody’

There’s a sense of security in a small, established neighborhood where residents can talk to one another easily about the issues they face, Kelly said.

In the 14 years that Kelly has lived in Little Casa View, she’s seen about five families move away, and the properties were immediately sold. Many of her neighbors live in the homes they grew up in, she said. 

“Everybody here pretty much knows everybody,” she said “We’ve had some incidents here years and years ago, and in talking with different officers, there is a trust factor. People will contact me and ask if I can call [Officer Ortiz] and say, ‘Here’s the situation.’”

Trust is particularly important between young people and law enforcement, Kelly added. She recently witnessed an officer pull over a car full of youth in another city and noticed that the young people immediately exited the car with their hands in the air, as though they automatically assumed it was going to be an unfriendly interaction. 

It’s positive interactions with police officers, such as the National Night Out environment, that build trust and remind residents that officers are there to protect them, she said. 

The Little Casa View neighborhood also does a trash bash a couple of times a year, where they pick a site on Gus Thomasson Road, Centerville Road, or Joaquin Drive and pick up trash. DPD and code enforcement officers typically join in. 

“When the kids are driving by and they see the police out there working with their parents, I think that shows them these are people who are helping,” Kelly said. “They’re not adversaries.”