Dallas Police Department Chief U. Renee Hall found herself in the hot seat before the Dallas city council as it was reported that the city is approaching it’s highest homicide rate in a decade.

According to police officials on Monday, Dallas is set to finish out the year with 228 homicides, which is double the amount seen since 2014. Hall was sat before the city council to answer some tough questions.

Committee chairman Adam McGough noted that criminals believe they can get away with crime in the city because of the departments woefully understaffed force and the fact that the district attorney has decided that low-level crimes aren’t worth pressing charges over. McGough pointed directly at the Chief for it all.

“The issues that we face to change that perception does come back to the chief,” McGough said. “We have got to hear messages from you and the Police Department that we will not tolerate crime in the city of Dallas.”

“Since the day I walked through the door, there has been a focus to reduce violent crime,” Hall responded defensively. “There’s nothing to assume that the Dallas Police Department under my leadership or any other leadership is soft on crime.”

Hall has attempted to say that crime statistics have fallen 22 percent under her watch, but according to DPD Officer Nick Novello, this is just a manipulation of numbers.

Novello, a DPD whistleblower, told RedState back in August of last year that high crimes such as homicide, rape, and assault go unanswered for hours due to a shortage of officers necessary to respond to such calls. However, dispatch will push the call into the supervising officer’s inbox in order to make it seem like the crime is getting dealt with:

Novello told RedState that certain calls such as threats with a deadly weapon or threats of suicide must be answered by no less than five officers according to Dallas PD policy. To avoid making it seem like the DPD has slow response times, Novello has said that dispatch will immediately put the call into a supervising officer’s inbox within his police unit’s computer. This way it seems like the call is being handled, despite the fact that the supervising officer may be waiting anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour for enough officers to be available.

According to Novello, this happens very regularly.

Furthermore, Novello notes that the DPD’s computer systems are cumbersome and unreliable. Filing reports that should only take 20 to 30 minutes will sometimes take several hours, and the system will sometimes not file the report at all. This doesn’t help to reveal the full extent of the crime happening in Dallas.

That’s not all. According to retired Dallas police officer Roy Messick, officers have been instructed to under-report crimes as well and gave an example.

“Let’s say a car slams into five other cars,” Messick told RedState, “the officer making the report is told to treat that as one crime instead of the five different counts it should be.”

Hall crippled the PD upon her entry by reassigning officers from the Vice Unit, effectively dissolving it. Now sex trafficking and prostitution are also another crime that only looks like it’s getting dealt with according to Messick.

“When Renee Hall was made chief of the Dallas PD, one of the first things she did was get rid of the Vice unit,” Messick told RedState. “Now instead of making arrests for prostitution, the prostitutes are just given citations. It makes it look like the crimes have been dealt with, but really nothing is happening.”

Novello reported to RedState that some have even some fall ill from stress due to the high volume they have to shoulder. All of this and more has made Dallas a playground for crime, and due to the lack of officers is only getting worse.

Novello spoke to the city council last year in February and reported that there is not a viable policing function in Dallas.