DALLAS — A violent week in North Texas, with an innocent child and a sheriff's deputy among the victims, might add credence to the widespread belief that crime increases during the holidays in the United States. One of the leading experts in that field says yes....and no.
The Tarrant County Sheriff's Office released bodycam footage on Monday of the Nov. 27 incident where an off-duty deputy was shot and wounded at a Fort Worth credit union during an attempted armed robbery. Deputy Brent Brown is expected to survive.
"Evil walks boldly among us," Sheriff Bill Waybourn said that night. "And we must not forget that."
Overnight Sunday, in a neighborhood with Christmas lights already in place, two men were shot, one fatally, and a third arrested in the 1300 block of Hartsdale Drive.
And, Sunday afternoon, four people shot and killed at a home in the 9700 block of Royce Drive.
"It was something horrible, something I didn't expect," Rufina Lopez Mejia said through her tears after the Sunday afternoon shooting deaths of four of her family members, including a 1-year-old child.
Her daughter Karina Lopez, 33, son-in-law Pepe Lopez, 50, granddaughter Vanessa De La Cruz, 20, and great-grandson Logan were shot and killed in what police are investigating as a domestic violence incident. The suspect Byron Carillo, 21, took his own life as police closed in to arrest him near Austin.
But, despite those traumatic incidents, Alex Piquero, a criminologist at the University of Miami, formerly at UT Dallas, and the former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, says it does not represent a holiday period increase in violent crime.
"But we do see a component of certain kinds of theft that actually increase during this time period that we're in right now," Piquero said.
He says there is traditionally an increase in theft during the holidays, even before consumers became dependent on package delivery services. Violent crime, on average, does increase during the summer months when temperatures and tempers soar and when students are out of school. Statistics compiled by the Dallas Police Department match those trends.
"And so those are the kind of factors that kind of coalesce around that same time period," Piquero said. "But we can't lose sight that public safety is a real serious problem in the United States. And it needs attention from local, city, state and federal sources."
Lopez Mejia would agree.
"Fue algo terrible," she told us in Spanish. Something terrible and horrible she did not expect, during the holidays or any other time of the year.
"I will remember them as a good family, an excellent mother with her daughter, an excellent granddaughter with her son, at his short age he had he was her treasure," she said.
According to reports from the National Crime Victimization Survey, robbery and personal larceny increase in December. These two crimes increase by about 20% during the last month of the year.