Fort Worth’s police chief spoke with multiple news outlets on Thursday about the deadly Como neighborhood shooting, where nearly a dozen people were shot on the night before the Fourth of July.
The shooting occurred in the Horne Street area of Como just before midnight, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
Eight people were injured, and Paul Willis, 18, Gabriella Navarrete, 18, and Cynthia Santos, 22, were killed by gunfire, per NBC 5 DFW.
Chief Neil Noakes spoke with NBC 5. He claimed Como is one of the best areas in Fort Worth and said he does not want one incident to define the community.
“Como has worked hard for a lot of years to become one of the most tight-knit, proud communities you’re going to see anywhere. They’re a very vital part of what makes Fort Worth, Fort Worth,” said Noakes. “Yet, they have been put in the national spotlight about a very negative occurrence that very possibly had nothing to do with people actually from Como.”
The police chief noted, however, that the tragic incident occurred against a backdrop of declining crime in Fort Worth.
“The problem is, we talk about crime going down. We talk about things going better, but we are sitting here talking about a mass shooting. Those things shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same sentence, but that’s where we are. We know that despite the fact that the numbers, many are trending in exactly the direction we want them to go, we know we can’t rely on that and just claim victory now. ‘We are done. Job’s over.’ That job will never be done,” Noakes said to NBC 5.
In a different interview with CBS News Texas, Noakes said the department needs all the help it can get to find out the identities of the individuals responsible for the shooting.
“[S]urveillance video shows hundreds of people, maybe a thousand or more people there. I can count on one hand the number who’ve actually come up and said they want to assist. We have some incredible homicide detectives, these investigators are doing incredible work,” said Noakes. “But we can only do so much.”
Noakes further stressed that information can be relayed to the Fort Worth Police Department anonymously.
Fort Worth has seen notable gains in tamping down crime, especially in its downtown area, which is patrolled by a specialized police unit that collaborates with private security guards. Downtown Dallas, however, continues to suffer from rampant crime — far more than in Fort Worth.
Additionally, criminal homicides increased in Dallas by more than 20% in the first four months of the year. The scale of the issue cannot be fully ascertained, as more recent City statistics have been unreliable due to a purported ransomware attack that allegedly affected City servers.
The Dallas Police Department has been short-staffed for years now. Current staffing levels hover around 3,100 officers when Dallas needs as many as 4,000 sworn personnel to adequately control crime, according to a City document.
“It’s going to be a very long time before we ever catch up to where we need to be or where we should be as far as manpower. Because of that, that customer service that we have long given to the city of Dallas, which very few cities actually do still, we just can’t do anymore. And I think we’re actually hurting our relationship with the community more than helping it by not changing to doing something different,” said Dallas Police Association President Mike Mata, according to the Dallas Observer.
