Temple Police Chief Floyd Mitchell directly addressed the city's recent spike in violent crime in a lengthy press release on Thursday.
While Temple normally saw an average of three murders per year over the last decade, the city had already undertaken five homicide investigations into seven deaths in the first three months of 2018.
In response, Chief Mitchell took the unprecedented action of personally providing specific status updates for each of those five cases. In his message, Mitchell said investigators believe the first two murders of the year were part of a pattern of home invasions that were also happening in other nearby cities.
Mitchell called the uptick in crime "troubling" and said he had taken several steps to combat the violent crime spike, including: forming a Violent Crimes Task Force, reassigning more than 15 officers to identifying violent crime patterns, and marshaling the resources of at least eight other offices.
Read the chief's full, unedited comments below.