re: .

quote:

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I told him out of Harris CO. all together. Everything up to the outlet mall is going down hill fast

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This is part of the effect I was talking about in what I posted. When you have one city covering such a large area and a county sheriff's office covering what the city has left out/doesn't patrol, you end up with suburbs susceptible to crime waves that are focused on neighborhoods where it is easy to get away with it. Those crimes get progressively worse and the smaller crimes spread out and so forth. It's not until there is some focused effort to increase public services (in this case police) that anything has a chance of turning around. Some neighborhoods will set up formal or informal organizations to address it, but the surrounding neighborhoods/commercial areas still go to crap most of the time.

Unfortunately, this costs money and the trend is rather than pay for services to just keep moving further and further out.

In the Dallas area, you have full fledged police departments that back up to each other. Most often these cities are land-locked and the area being patrolled is pre-defined. That is why cities such as Frisco, Plano, etc. have it much easier that the outskirts of Houston and/or the unincorporated areas of Harris County.