Fort Worth police roll out data-driven hotspots plan targeting 12 micro-grids to curb violent street crime

The Fort Worth Public Safety Committee on June 2 heard a detailed briefing on a new, evidence-based violent street crime plan that maps the city into 100-by-100 meter grids and targets a small number of high-crime cells with focused policing and services.

Dr. Mike Smith, a professor of criminology at the University of Texas at San Antonio, told the committee the strategy rests on three pillars: hotspots policing, a mid-term place-based strategy for persistently violent locations, and an offender-focused program known as focused deterrence. “Violent crime … happens in a relatively small number of places,” Dr. Smith said, arguing that concentrating resources in those places is more effective than broad saturation.

Dr. Smith described the city’s mapping work: Fort Worth contains 92,348 such grids; between 2021 and 2025 some 6,700 grids produced any violent street crime, and roughly 1,300 grids—about 1.5%—accounted for roughly half of the city’s violent street crime. The near-term hotspot treatment launched April 1; the department is currently treating 12 grids, a figure Dr. Smith said represents far less than 1% of the city’s grid cells.

The hotspot tactics include two coordinated treatments: a high-visibility approach (an officer out of a vehicle for a 15-minute peak-hour patrol with emergency lights on) and an offender-focused directed response unit that targets persistently violent individuals, those with warrants, or repeat actors. Each treatment period lasts 60 days; at the end of a period the team reanalyzes crime data and adjusts deployments, with results added to a dashboard for senior police leaders.

Chief Garcia of the Fort Worth Police Department framed the work as intelligence-led and warned against equating it with saturation tactics. “This is not stop and frisk,” Chief Garcia said, adding that arrests in treated hotspots have fallen in some cases as reported crime declined. He and Dr. Smith emphasized the plan is intended to be surgical and to coordinate other city resources where underlying place-based conditions require cross-agency responses.

Committee members asked whether focusing on hotspots merely displaces crime to nearby areas. Dr. Smith pointed to his team’s evaluation work in other Texas cities and elsewhere, saying systematic displacement is rare and adjacent “catchment” zones often see crime declines as well.

The committee also pressed questions about the Directed Response Unit’s sustainability and whether citizens outside treated areas should expect changes in response times. Chief Garcia said the DRU is a deployable resource and that commanders remain responsible for operations across the city; he said the plan should not reduce service in other neighborhoods, though response times can fluctuate for other reasons.

The presenters said they will continue 60-day evaluations and report results publicly, including a 12-month analysis to the committee. The briefing closed with an offer to return with follow-up data and recommendations.