Parents, advocates and community leaders in Dallas say they’ve felt the weight of youth violence in recent months. The city has recorded fewer murders since 2023, but this year the number of teenage victims doesn’t appear to be decreasing at the same rate.
Experts say youth violence is a uniquely difficult problem to solve, and the challenges have limited the impact of Dallas’ crime plan on juveniles. Despite those barriers, local leaders are hard at work to make a change.
“If we can convince them that there’s another way, that there’s opportunities outside of what they grew up seeing … that’s our job,” said Willie F. Johnson, the principal at South Oak Cliff High School.
From 2023 to 2024, Dallas homicides and the number of youths who were victims of them fell at a similar rate. But in the first seven months of 2025, overall homicides have decreased faster.
As of July 31, 18 people younger than 20 had died in a homicide in Dallas in 2025, according to data tracked by The Dallas Morning News. That’s an 18 percent decrease from the same period in 2024, but total homicides decreased faster, at a rate of 36 percent.
The Connection Between Youth Victims and Offenders
Across all age groups, academic research has clearly shown that being victimized by crime makes someone more likely to become an offender, and vice versa. Mike Smith, a criminology professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said the reason that this overlap is so strong is because victims and offenders come from similar or intersecting communities. The same people usually hang out at the same places or engage in similar activities, he added.
Smith said the difficulty in reducing youth crime is in part due to the fact that many teens can be more emotional and less logical than adults. Those developmental limits can make it harder to design interventions for youths because young people don’t always respond to the same incentives as adults.
“To the extent that there’s any sort of rational behavior on the part of offenders who commit homicides, it’s even less so among young people,” Smith said. “That’s just the nature of the undeveloped human brain. It’s impulsive.”
Under former Chief Eddie García, Dallas police and the city in 2021 implemented a plan to reduce violent crime. Smith helped design the plan, which uses three research-backed strategies to tackle violence from different angles.
Two of the strategies take a geographic approach: One, hot spots policing, increases officers at certain places in a targeted manner; the other seeks to disrupt criminal networks associated with specific locations.
Smith said the city’s plan does not expressly consider the age of offenders, but that any young people present at a targeted location could be impacted.
The third strategy, focused deterrence, is usually not available with teenagers. It offers high-risk individuals a slew of resources to help them change course and uses criteria from police and court records to calculate whom to target .
Smith said this tactic isn’t possible with teenagers because the juvenile justice system is designed to rehabilitate, which means criminal histories often aren’t available for use in determining who is most in need of resources. The barriers to data can make it “almost impossible” to figure out whom to target, Smith said.
He also said that academic research on reducing teen violence is relatively thin because of those developmental and systematic barriers to testing new solutions. That lack of empirical guidance makes crime among young people a difficult issue across the country.
However, Smith did point to research from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions that he said showed promising new results. It studied the effectiveness of interventions from a community program in Baltimore, such as teaching conflict resolution skills, mediating disputes and connecting people with social services. The program resulted in a statistically significant decrease in homicides and nonfatal shootings in most of the neighborhoods studied.
In Dallas, similar work is undertaken by small community nonprofits that are on the frontlines of addressing teen violence and helping young people build successful futures.
Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, emphasized the importance of tailoring these community violence interventions to a city. He said research and data collection can help leaders avoid making assumptions about who needs support.
But data-based work can be a tall order for those small community nonprofits. They are already strapped for funding, and their strength is in the personal experiences and community knowledge of their staff, not academic research. Sierra-Arévalo said some academics are partnering with local nonprofit leaders to do the research to support the community work, like the CORNERS team at Northwestern University, but funding is a major hurdle.
“We very often dump dollars into policing but not into alternatives like community violence interventions,” Sierra-Arévalo said.
Despite those hurdles, grassroots organizations in Dallas are tackling the problem head-on with interpersonal strategies, faith and mentorship to reach kids.
Black Boys Meditate teaches emotional regulation and communication strategies to deter disputes before they erupt into violence.
“Sometimes we want to point the finger at the child, but we have our work to do as parents,” said Helsa Thompson, CEO of Aura House, which is behind the nonprofit.
Alex Nelson uses money from his own pockets to fund his nonprofit, Love Deposit, to invest care and affection into children and young fathers. He sees the work of taking kids on camping trips and teaching men how to be strong role models as vital to preventing violent behavior.
Those in daily contact with youths feel the urgency to act now to combat youth violence. Johnson, the South Oak Cliff principal, said he wants to help open students up to new opportunities. As an educator, he said schools are on the frontlines and must be a part of the solutions. He believes mentorship is crucial to helping students see the diversity of paths before them instead of feeling trapped into one outcome.
Religious leaders in Dallas also see that need for mentorship and community building. Donald Parish emphasized the importance of connecting with young people through their schools, and Michael Waters talked about the active youth group at his church that leads worship services once a month.
Urban Specialists supports victims, specifically through a contract with the city of Dallas to help victims of gun violence. Through partnerships and a network of individuals in the community, the organization strives to connect with families and victims within 72 hours of a crime. Candace Fleming, their chief operations officer, said the organization works to help stabilize people in the immediate aftermath by providing financial assistance for funerals or memorials.
She said the organization then moves in with wrap-around services like counseling, mentorship and apartment locators to help victims move forward. Fleming added that her staff reaches back out after at least 30 days, but often, people they work with join the organization’s ecosystem of violence prevention programming.
After losing her daughter to gun violence in March, Marcela Nino-Herrera couldn’t stop praising the support she received from Urban Specialists. They helped fund a balloon release and the funeral, and have continued to check on her in the months since. She’s appreciated the unconditional nature of their support, always welcoming her but never requiring anything.
In the months since, Marcela said her world has become advocating for Angelyn and trying to help others. She’s attended a community meeting on gun violence and said she’s planning a dinner for other parents who’ve lost their children to violence.
Long passionate about community service, Marcela said it felt like Angelyn was putting her on the path to get involved again, to imagine a new purpose for herself. She’s been horrified to realize just how easy it is these days for teenagers to access guns, how often it turns tragic.
“Sometimes when I think of who did this to my daughter, I think about the silhouette that you see on Facebook when [someone doesn’t] put a picture,” Marcela said. “Sometimes I think about it and wonder ‘what if they’re a kid too?’”
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