Avi Adelman is a free man. Dallas Area Rapid Transit informed Adelman on Tuesday that the agency is dropping criminal trespassing charges. Adelman, a self-described citizen journalist and well-known gadfly, was arrested by DART police while photographing an incident at Rosa Parks Plaza, a transit hub in downtown Dallas. “A…
The elephant in Dallas ISD’s living room is segregation. Has been for decades. Before 1970, when Sam Tasby sued to force the district to integrate, the issue was the Jim Crow-style separation of blacks and whites. Since then, it’s been the flight of whites (who now account for 4 percent…
Tanya Ragan insists on meeting at night. “DPD shift change around 11 p.m.,” she explains in a text message. “It is a different world at sundown.” It’s 10 p.m. when she pulls out of the parking lot of the Green Door, a pub in a building she owns by the…
At 10 a.m. Friday, Dallas police Assistant Chief Gary Tittle briefed the media on the results of the department’s 12-day-old downtown panhandling crackdown. As of Thursday, cops had made 128 arrests as part of the initiative, which downtown inhabitants say has already had a dramatic impact: On Wednesday, commercial real…
Four decades ago, when he was 16, Philadelphia police wrote Avi Adelman a ticket for violating curfew. In all the time he’s spent chasing cop cars and ambulances with his camera, in his quarter century as the Barking Dog of Lower Greenville, in the 59.85 years he’s spent being Avi…
On Thursday, Dallas ISD trustees will be confronted with some sobering statistics about the stark economic segregation that divides Dallas, more than almost anywhere else in the country, into silos of haves and have-nots. According to a 2012 study from the Pew Research Center, 37 percent of low-income residents in…
Ray Hunt has done many good things for the city of Dallas. He built Reunion Tower, without which the Dallas skyline would just be a bunch of boring rectangles. He was an early financial backer of D Magazine, without which we would be unable to identify which Dallas women are the most…
Early Saturday afternoon, nine days after he and a friend allegedly carjacked 37-year-old Sarah Hoff in her downtown Dallas parking garage before taking her car and credit card to a Pleasant Grove McDonald’s, DART police found 17-year-old Ira Booker at a downtown train station. According to police, Booker initially tried…
When Deputy Chief Gary Tittle formally announced the Dallas Police Department’s new downtown panhandling crackdown on Monday, he was careful to define the target of the operation as “that aggressive panhandler, the one approaching an individual demanding money, asking for money, impeding their walkway on the sidewalks, getting out into the street,…
Darryl Davis is something of a celebrity in downtown Dallas. He’s been roaming the streets for years, hounding passersby for money with an intensity and tenacity that other neighborhood panhandlers can’t or won’t muster. In the past nine months, he’s been ticketed five times for panhandling, according to municipal court…
On Thursday night, after a couple of months of discussion and one scaldingly hot take by Dallas Morning News columnist James Ragland (“I vote YES on recess”), Dallas ISD trustees on Thursday night required all district elementary schools to provide recess, a minimum of 20 minutes through the remainder of the…
It was a crisp but bright day in late December, and James was taking advantage of the sunshine to dry his pants on a chain-link fence paralleling St. Paul Street just south of downtown. At the bottom of a small embankment, squeezed between the Interstate 30 service road and Dallas…
Jont’e Ross pulls onto the LBJ Freeway entrance ramp and accelerates past the glowing Sport City Toyota parking lot. Just before it’s time to merge, Ross veers right instead of left and brings his lumbering Ford pickup to a stop in a broad ribbon of grass running beneath hulking transmission lines. A…
The official story of homelessness in Dallas over the past decade has generally been a positive one. According to the annual census that the Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance conducts each January with the twin goals of measuring the scope of the problem and remaining eligible for some $17 million in…
It barely made a blip on the local news: a homeless man found dead on Sunday morning of what Dallas police described cryptically only as “homicidal violence.” The news made a bigger splash in Tent City, the sprawling homeless encampment under Interstate 45 — now more than 200 tents strong —…
Last week, Dallas Police Chief David Brown appeared on YouTube to offer a personal thank you for helping the city achieve “an unprecedented 12th consecutive year of crime reduction.” Between 2004 and 2015, Dallas experienced a 53 percent drop in crime, which he touted as the “largest of any big…
Dallas’ urban core is in the midst of a renaissance. Empty nesters and yuppy millennials are eschewing the grownup responsibilities of suburban homeownership. Developers are clearing dilapidated inner-city neighborhoods to fill the seemingly insatiable demand for luxury Khrushchyovkas. There are people downtown after business hours, and many of them aren’t even…
Westlake seems like a perfectly lovely place to live, so long as one doesn’t mind being neighbors with Glenn Beck. It’s astoundingly prosperous, with a median household income north of $250,000, which is where the Census Bureau stops counting. Children there are automatically admitted to Westlake Academy, the charter school…
On Friday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott put forward the “Texas Plan,” a radical proposal to reshape the U.S. Constitution and shift power from the federal to state governments by calling what’s known as an Article V Convention. Under the Constitution’s Article V, a two-thirds super-majority of state legislatures can call…
Reverchon Park is one of Dallas’ best public spaces, an unexpectedly sylvan expanse sandwiched between Uptown and Oak Lawn. Yesterday morning, the loveliness was marred by an overpowering stench of gasoline. like someone had dumped out several gallons of fuel a few feet away. The smell had no obvious source. There…
For most of the aughts, Bryan Kilburn was the city’s Great Trinity Forest guy. He counted trees in the 6,000-acre woods and, as the forest’s senior program manager, spoke on the forest’s behalf at City Council and community meetings. He was instrumental in creating the city’s plan for preserving the…
In all the discussion surrounding Texas’ open-carry law when it was being considered by the state legislature last spring, the issue of individual liberty and Second Amendment rights came up a lot. The notion that allowing handguns to be carried en plein air might seriously reduce crime was a comparatively…
