Kevin Todora

Most Dallas police officers don't live in Dallas. Does that matter?

Policing a city like Dallas, even as crime falls, never goes smoothly. But it's been an especially rocky year for the Dallas Police Department, where, in the wake of Ferguson's violence, the city saw string of officers shooting and sometimes killing citizens.

The violence led to multiple town hall meetings hosted by District Attorney Craig Watkins, where attendees had one major suggestion for improving relations: Make more of the force live in the city they patrol. Only about a fifth of Dallas cops live in Dallas proper. If more lived in town, activists say, they would be perceived as less an occupying force and more of a really vigilant and badass neighbor.

It's a logical enough thesis and the rationale for residency requirements that exist across the city, although the data suggests the impact isn't what you might expect. Regardless: It's not happening.

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Sky Chadde

Marchers had a police escort, which stopped traffic so they could pass through intersections. Here, the marchers turn into Main Street Garden.

Marchers, about 50 strong which would grow to a couple hundred, walked from Founder's Square, down the right lane of Main Street, to Main Street Garden last night in protest of police brutality, which in Dallas and nationwide disproportionately affects blacks. Chants of "indict, convict, put those killer cops in jail, the whole damn system is guilty as hell" and "this is what a police state looks like" filled downtown, as well as sirens from the marchers' police escorts. One man in a T-shirt with the Dallas Police Department logo shouted "go police" from the sidewalk as he watched the marchers.

A who's who of the Dallas anti-police brutality movement was there: Collette Flanagan, who founded Mothers Against Police Brutality after police shot and killed her son, Clinton Allen; Charles Goodson, of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club that recently delivered a report on police shootings to the U.S. Attorney's Office; and Kooper Karaway, of the Indigenous People's Liberation Party that helped the Gun Club deliver the report.

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Open Carry Tarrant County, via Facebook

Over the summer, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor sided with Open Carry Tarrant County's Kory Watkins and struck down as unconstitutional an Arlington city ordinance banning people from distributing literature -- in his case copies of the Constitution -- to passing motorists. According to a brief prepared by the city attorney's office, the fallout was swift and disastrous.

"Within two weeks of Judge O'Connor's ruling on July 14, 2014, the City of Arlington received a request from a little league baseball team seeking permission to solicit donations on Cooper Street in the City of Arlington," the brief says. "The little league team sought to raise money for a little league trip by handing out bottled water on Cooper Street as a method for soliciting donations."

Next thing you know, the Girl Scouts will be wanting to hawk their absurdly delicious cookies from the Interstate 30 shoulder. A chilling prospect on its face, but in case the thinness of the line between gun-toting libertarians passing out Constitutions and Girl Scouts distributing cholesterol-laden desserts didn't sufficiently alarm the Arlington City Council, the city's lawyers provided some gruesome traffic statistics. Over the past four-and-a-half years, 625 pedestrians have been run over in Arlington. Thirty-three of them died.

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Prepared to declare disaster, Dallas County officials swerved from the dramatic statement at the last minute this afternoon.

On Thursday, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, Mayor Mike Rawlings, and members of city health authorities convened for an emergency commissioners court meeting to officially declare disaster in Dallas. But after a private debate, and a significantly tamer public discussion, the court agreed that while disaster declaration was a "tool in the toolbox," it's not quite time to say there's an emergency in Dallas.

Court members stressed how well Dallas is handling the Ebola outbreak and implied that declaring disaster would increase the level of fear and uncertainty throughout the city and indeed the country.

"I think given what is happening locally, it has an impact nationally, and as such we need to move cautiously with this declaration," Commissioner John Wiley Price said. "It is in our toolbox, but I am not sure ... whether it is premature."

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Fort Worth Star-Telegram via Twitter

Thomas Eric Duncan.

Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S., had a fever of 103 degrees during his first visit to Presbyterian Hospital, The Associated Press reports. The Centers for Disease Control lists a fever of greater than 101.5 degrees as one of the potential signs that someone has contracted the virus.

Despite his high fever, a physician noted that Duncan was "negative for fever and chills," according to the AP. Duncan also complained of abdominal pain, which is another potential sign of the virus. He was released from the hospital after his initial check-up.

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Sky Chadde

The Huey P. Newton Gun Club and the Indigenous People's Liberation Party stand across the street from the Earle Cabell Federal Building and Courthouse.

In hopes of raising awareness of police brutality, two groups walked single-file together through downtown Dallas Monday afternoon with rifles slung over their shoulders. The Huey P. Newton Gun Club, which marched down Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in August, and the Indigenous People's Liberation Party stopped in front of the Earle Cabell Federal Building and Courthouse. As about 10 members stood in a line on the sidewalk across the building's entrance, three members went inside and attempted to hand a report directly to U.S. Attorney Sarah Saldana.

They got as far as her division manager with the report, compiled from data obtained through open-records requests, which shows that the majority of victims of Dallas police shootings are from the minority community. It's the same report Dallas Communities Organizing for Change released to the media last week. To the marchers, the numbers in the report are evidence of a systemic problem of police abuse toward minorities.

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Dallas Weekly, one of the city's main black-owned newspapers, just published its latest issue online. The issue date suggests the cover was designed pre-ebola, but the timing of the email blast they just put out is ... unfortunate.

Sky Chadde

The scene of an officer-involved shooting.

Dallas Communities Organizing for Change, which has been largely critical of the Dallas Police Department, hopes to set a higher bar for the department in how it identifies incidents when officers fire their weapons. "They don't categorize officer-involved shooting appropriately," says Stephen Benavides, the organization's spokesman.

The department, police spokesman Major Jeff Cotner says, essentially divides officer-involved shootings into two categories: hits and misses. Now, a hit is also divided into whether the person shot was injured or killed. In order to avoid confusion, Cotner says, most reports released to the media that tally up officer-involved shootings only include the hits.

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hermanturnip

The Dallas Police Department is swapping its old Tasers for new-and-improved models.

In the next three to four months, all Dallas police officers on patrol will be equipped with new, smart Tasers that are safer than their predecessors, Chief David Brown said at Wednesday's City Council meeting. After the council approved a five-year deal with Taser International Inc. for the purchase and maintenance of Tasers, the department's 700 or so old Tasers will be replaced with 2,000.

"We haven't in the past had a lot of Tasers in our department," Brown said at a town hall meeting last month. "Because of the challenges with Tasers causing deaths early on, our department backed off of Tasers several years back."

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Yousuf Fahimuddin

Arlington City Council member Robert Rivera can rattle off scores of reasons why his constituents think the city should pull the plug on its red-light cameras. They worry about Big Brother's growing omniscience and the privatization of policing, or object to the government making a revenue grab while cloaking it in public safety measure. Some just have a gut feeling that it's unconstitutional.

Rivera doesn't formally endorse any of those sentiments, which, though they have been echoing across the country for a decade, have failed to slow the rapid adoption of the technology by cash-strapped local governments. His stated reason for floating a proposal to abolish red-light cameras in Arlington is more pragmatic and thus less easy to dismiss as the product of the populist fringe. Arlington's system simply isn't fair.

Tarrant County Tax Assessor-Collector Ron Wright has repeatedly refused Arlington's entreaties to block the vehicle registrations of red-light scofflaws, saying that cities are responsible for collecting their own fines. (In a similar display of chutzpah, Collin County Tax Assessor Kenneth Maun rebuffed similar advances by the NTTA.) Because violations caught by red-light cameras are civil offenses that can't go on credit reports or driving records, there are no consequences for ignoring the tickets, meaning the upstanding citizens who actually pay them are suckers.

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