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Robert Turner knows his main job as Fifth Circuit District Attorney is to prosecute those who commit crimes.

However, he wants to be more proactive to do as much as he can to prevent crime, especially in Dallas County.

In the year 2023, the county had 26 homicides. That number decreased to 10 in 2024, but the county already has half of last year’s number in less than half of the year gone.

Tuner’s goal, as he addressed the Rotary Club of Selma on Monday afternoon, is to see that number go to zero.

He has aptly named the initiative Project Zero.

“Project Zero is aimed at setting a goal circuit wide with zero homicides,” Turner said while speaking to the Rotary Club of Selma on Monday. “That’s not something to be proud of when you start rattling out numbers like (26 homicides). If you live in Birmingham or Montgomery, you’re like, oh, 26, that’s nothing. But you’re talking about populations in excess of 200,000 people. For our area, that’s too many.”

Turner wants to set the bar high, and he wants to look at all avenues of crime prevention. Some of that includes campaigns where they give out fliers to students to help instill prevention at an early age. He also wants to look at the demographics and geography of the area to determine where the most violent crimes are and to see if there could be other avenues to help improve police presence in those areas.

In addition to this, he has also held several training seminars with law enforcement officers. One in particular was working with the University of Alabama on the crime lab simulation project. They looked at old cases from the area and used them to develop best practices when investigating cases.

“We trained the first responding officers, the patrolmen, as well as the investigators as to what the best practices are when dealing with homicide cases and gun cases involving juveniles,” Turner said. “We had over 20 law enforcement officers show up from the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department, Selma City Police Department, Marion Police Department, Perry County Sheriff’s Department, and we had two representatives from the state bureau investigation that were there.”

Turner also had two seminars last week with the Selma Police Department attended by 13 on one day and 15 on another.

“The professional relationship is more important than the personal one,” the district attorney said. “I don’t have to be your best friend. You don’t have to be mine in order for us to do our jobs in a way that the citizens are best served. So we’ve been conducting those training sessions in an effort to promote communication and to provide a better service for the community.”

His office has also worked closely with school systems to curb truancy issues. They are able to see the daily report and to see who is absent or tardy and what the excuses are for them.

When an issue arises, parents will receive a letter about the truancy from the district attorney’s office. One hiccup was when they realized that some data regarding absences was not being entered in a timely manner, which made some students look like they had a lot of unexcused absences. Turner said the schools have corrected those issues.

But he said the program has also been helpful in determining some needs that parents were having. He noted that one parent was not able to get their students to school due to a mechanical problem with their car, and they were not able to get it repaired.

He said his office was able to work with them to help the parent get the car repaired so their students could get back to school on a daily basis.

He also talked about other issues including adjusting prescribed sentencing, reducing the backlog of cases that need to be presented to the grand jury and the challenges of tracking home-school and virtual-learning students.