Why The Dallas Morning News is writing about every homicide victim in Dallas this year

Inside the Newsroom is a monthly series from Katrice Hardy, executive editor of The Dallas Morning News.
A pastor’s son. A 16-year-old boy. A dad killed in a robbery that his young son and wife witnessed.
Last year was one of the deadliest years in Dallas since 1997. That made Dallas one of the few cities around the country that experienced an increase in murders.
The shocking revelation was discovered while a couple of our journalists reported on the crime trends for the year. When their story was done, the jarring statistic was something breaking news reporter Jamie Landers and public safety reporter Kelli Smith couldn’t shake.
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“We started having bigger conversations about what this means for us as a city, and how our ability — or inability — to address what’s happening here is the difference between life and death for dozens of people,” Smith said.
Their conversations prompted the newsroom to profile every single person who dies from violent crime in Dallas.
“There is often an exponential amount of attention paid to notably horrific crimes — largely mass shootings — but it’s important that we make an effort to say that while it’s a tragedy when it happens in a church or a school or an outlet mall, it’s also a tragedy when it happens to one person on a city street,” Landers said. “We are losing more than 200 people every year to acts of violence.”
Jamie and Kelli are now joined by more than a dozen of our journalists in profiling everyone who dies this year from violent crime. The families they have spoken to have said they often feel as if their pain has been overlooked and oversimplified. The mother of the 16-year-old son shared that a stranger stayed with him as he lay outside her apartment gasping for air after being shot.
Another mother was grateful our reporting to profile her son resulted in more information and access to detectives investigating his death. There was also this text sent to one of our reporters from the family member of someone we profiled: “You all just don’t know how much this meant to me and my family. I know my mother is looking down smiling and proud of this story. You all did an amazing job. I can’t say thank you enough.”
The Dallas Morning News hopes this work will help violent crime in our community decrease.
“We hope that by memorializing every life, while also probing what officials are doing to address these issues, our work can aid in the understanding that these deaths are preventable and dependent upon our community’s willingness to come and work together,” Landers said. “Last year, Dallas police Chief Eddie García told us that it had seemed as if some in the city had lost the value of human life. If even one person who has felt numb to this epidemic sees themselves or someone they love in one of these stories and asks what they can do, then we’ve done our part.”
I couldn’t have expressed those sentiments better.
Head here to read more from our homicide project focused on sharing the stories of all people killed in Dallas in 2024.
As always, we appreciate and couldn’t do this work without you.
Thank you for reading.
Katrice