FWPD West Division Newsletter

September 2026

FWPD Connects with Thousands of Families at Hand-In-Hand Resource Fair

The Fort Worth Police Department brought crime prevention and community engagement to the Fort Worth Zoo during Uplift Education’s Hand-In-Hand Resource Fair. Central and West Division Crime Prevention Specialists Holloway and Mitsuhashi, joined by NPOs Campbell, Caprio, Cloud, D. Johnson, and Park, welcomed families and shared valuable safety information and resources.

The FWPD table was a popular stop, attracting an estimated 2,652 adults and 2,942 children. Young visitors were especially excited to receive coloring sheets, crayons, and Junior Police Badge stickers. With plenty of smiles, conversations, and safety tips shared, the event was a great opportunity for FWPD to connect with families and build positive relationships throughout the community.

Target Hosts Community Food Drive to Benefit the Las Vegas Trail Rise Community Center

West Division Helps Local Students Start the School Year Strong at Como Community Center

West Division Citizens on Patrol (COP) members spearheaded a community-wide collection drive to provide much-needed back-to-school supplies to students in the Como Community. The effort brought together COP volunteers, West Division officers and staff, and generous community members who donated school supplies to help local students prepare for a successful school year.

The project unfolded in three phases.

Phase One: On July 29, 2026, COP hosted a “Meet and Greet” featuring coffee and donuts for community members who stopped by to donate school supplies. The event provided an opportunity for volunteers to personally thank donors while strengthening relationships between the police department and the community.

Phase Two: COP volunteers gathered to sort, organize, and prepare the donated supplies for distribution. Their efforts ensured that the items were ready for students and families when the big day arrived.

Phase Three: On August 8, 2026, COP volunteers, along with West and Northwest Division Neighborhood Patrol Officers (NPOs), distributed the school supplies to excited students at the Como Community Center.

The back-to-school initiative is a great example of what can happen when police officers, volunteers, and community members work together. Through their generosity and commitment, everyone involved helped local students begin the new school year with the supplies they need—and a strong reminder that their community cares about their success.

Ridgmar Place Hosts First Thursday

On Thursday, August 6, 2026, West Division Neighborhood Patrol Officers, Citizens on Patrol members, and the West Division Crime Prevention Specialist attended Ridgmar Place's First Thursday Breakfast. Ridgmar Place began hosting these monthly gatherings for first responders in December 2025 as a way to strengthen relationships between residents and public safety personnel. The breakfasts provide an informal setting where residents can meet with first responders, enjoy meaningful conversations, and share a made-to-order breakfast. The event continues to be a great opportunity to foster community connections and build positive relationships.

Education:

Ridgmar Place Lunch & Learn

Reclaiming Digital Autonomy was the focus of this month's Lunch & Learn program at Ridgmar Place. During the presentation, residents explored practical strategies for reducing their digital footprint and protecting their personal information, online habits, and privacy in an increasingly connected world. They learned that nearly every online action leaves a lasting digital trail and that information shared online can be difficult—or impossible—to erase. The session emphasized that maintaining long-term digital privacy begins with building simple, consistent habits that become part of everyday life.

Overton South Neighborhood Association (OSNA) Holds Good Neighbor Safety Club

Residents of the Overton South Neighborhood Association (OSNA) came together on August 17, 2026, for their monthly Good Neighbor Safety Club meeting, continuing their commitment to keeping the community informed and connected. NPO Cole (K18) joined neighbors to share updates on recent crime activity in the area, helping residents stay aware of what’s happening close to home. CPS Mitsuhashi spoke with attendees about the rise in phishing scams and how these schemes can impact local families. Neighbors also received a practical handout outlining ten simple actions they can take to protect themselves and each other from becoming victims. The meeting reflected OSNA’s ongoing dedication to fostering a safer, stronger, and well‑informed community.

Western Fort Worth Rotary Club

The Unseen Threat: Protecting Yourself from AI Voice Cloning Scams was the focus of this month's presentation at the Rotary Club's bi-monthly meeting. During the presentation, participants learned how scammers use artificial intelligence to clone voices, the most common tactics used to commit these crimes, the growing scope of the threat, and practical steps they can take to protect themselves from becoming victims.

The presentation also included an overview of data broker cleaning services. Residents learned how personal information is collected and sold by data brokers, how these services help reduce an individual's online footprint, and the various service options available for those interested in purchasing additional privacy protection. 

Crime Prevention Tip of the Month

September Crime Prevention Tip: Be Alert as the Seasons Change

As summer comes to an end and daily routines shift with the start of the school year, September is a great time to refresh your personal and home security habits.

The Fort Worth Police Department encourages residents to:

• Lock all doors and windows, even when you're home or away for only a few minutes.

• Keep vehicles locked and remove valuables from plain view.

• Turn on exterior lighting or use motion-activated lights to improve visibility around your home.

• Report suspicious activity immediately. If something doesn't look right, trust your instincts and call the police. Quick reporting can help prevent crimes and keep our community safe.

Crime prevention is a shared responsibility. By staying aware, securing your property, and looking out for your neighbors, you help make our community a safer place for everyone.

Federal cyber officials have repeatedly warned that criminals are quietly taking over old home and small-office routers, the kind of internet boxes that manufacturers have stopped updating, and folding them into networks used to disguise online crime. Because these devices no longer receive security patches, known flaws in them stay open indefinitely, and their owners usually have no sign anything is wrong. The FBI has gone as far as naming specific end-of-life models and urging households and small businesses to check their hardware and, in many cases, replace it.

Why end-of-life routers are such easy targets

A router reaches “end of life” when its maker stops issuing software updates, which means any security hole discovered afterward is never fixed. Attackers scan the internet for these unsupported models, exploit the unpatched vulnerabilities, and install malware that lets them route their own traffic through the device without the owner noticing. The bureau has warned that criminal proxy services build much of their infrastructure this way, hijacking outdated routers and reselling access to them, a threat detailed in the FBI’s alert on criminal proxy services exploiting end-of-life routers. Devices with remote administration switched on are especially exposed, because that feature gives an attacker a ready-made door.

The appeal to criminals is that a compromised home router looks, to the outside world, like an ordinary residential internet connection. That makes traffic passing through it hard to flag as malicious, which is exactly why such devices are prized for hiding fraud, credential attacks, and other crimes.

The models and dates the FBI has flagged

The warnings are not generic. In an advisory issued in 2025 and escalated with a bureau notice in March 2026, investigators identified specific end-of-life router models across several major brands and pointed owners to check their equipment against the list, guidance laid out in the FBI’s March 2026 industry notification. The affected hardware spans well-known consumer names, and the common thread is age: routers that have passed the point where their manufacturers provide support. Officials have tied the compromises to malware variants that specifically hunt for such devices and enlist them into proxy networks used across dozens of countries.

The practical instruction is to identify the exact model number and check whether the manufacturer still supports it. Owners often cannot recall how old a router is, and a device that has been reliably passing internet traffic for years can feel fine while being fully compromised, which is why the FBI stresses checking the model rather than relying on whether the box appears to work.

From petty proxies to a state-run botnet

The router threat is not limited to for-profit criminals. The FBI has also acted against nation-state operations built on the same weakness. In one case, the bureau disrupted a botnet assembled from thousands of home and office routers and attributed it to a Russian military intelligence unit, an operation described in an FBI public service announcement on the router botnet takedown. That effort showed the far end of the spectrum: the same neglected devices that fuel ordinary fraud can also be marshaled by a government-backed group for espionage and disruption.

The overlap matters for ordinary owners because it means an unsupported router is not just a personal risk but a potential building block for large-scale campaigns. A device left online and unpatched can end up serving purposes far beyond what its owner would ever imagine.

What owners of old hardware can actually do

The bureau’s core recommendation is blunt: if a router has reached end of life, replace it with a current, supported model. For devices that are merely outdated but still supported, the advice is to install the latest firmware, disable remote administration, and set a strong, unique password in place of any factory default. Rebooting a router can clear some kinds of malware temporarily, but it does not close the underlying vulnerability, so it is a stopgap rather than a fix.

Checking a router is a modest task with an outsized payoff. Finding the model number, looking up whether the manufacturer still supports it, and either updating or replacing it takes far less effort than dealing with the fallout of a compromised home network. Because these advisories describe a threat that remains active rather than a one-time incident, the guidance stays relevant well beyond the date any single warning was issued.

Why a household device became a national security issue

The router sits at a peculiar intersection: it is a cheap consumer appliance most people forget about, and it is also the single gateway between a home and the internet. That combination is what makes neglected models so valuable to attackers, from small-time fraud rings to foreign intelligence services, and it is why federal warnings about them have grown more pointed over time. The devices are numerous, long-lived, and rarely maintained, and each unsupported one is a standing invitation. The FBI’s repeated message reduces to a single habit worth adopting: know what router is in the house, know whether it is still supported, and retire it when it is not.

Routers that are end-of-life are listed below by manufacturer name and model number.

D-Link

o DIR-818LW Wireless Router

o DIR-850L Wireless Router

o DIR-860L Wireless Router

Hikvision

o DS-2CD2020F-I IP Camera

o DS-2CD2420F-IW IP Camera

Netgear

o DGN2200v4 Wireless Router

o AC1900 R7000

TP-Link

o Archer C20 Wireless Router

o TL-WR840N Wireless Router

o TL-WR849N Wireless Router

o WR841N Wireless Router

Zyxel

o EMG6726-B10A Router

o PMG5617GA Home Gateway Unit (HGU)

o VMG1312-B10D Wireless Router

o VMG1312-T20B Wireless Router

o VMG3925-B10A Wireless Router

o VMG3925-B10C Wireless Router

o VMG4825-B10A Wireless Router

o VMG4927-B50A Wireless Router

o VMG8825-T50K Wireless Router

Scam Alert

What are NPO's?

By having the Neighborhood Patrol Officers dedicated to specific geographic areas, the officers are not only able to become more familiar with the area than regular patrol officers, but they are also able to serve as a resource for and get to know area residents and business owners, learn about neighborhood concerns, and build working relationships with area Citizen on Patrol volunteers to work hand-in-hand in reducing neighborhood crime and promoting crime prevention tools. 

Primary Duties: 

• Work with crime analysts to identify crime trends within assigned neighborhoods, maintain open lines of communication with detectives, and assist the Information Management Section and supervisors in planning appropriate actions to address issues. 

• Foster positive community leadership as a means to empower citizens within their neighborhoods by encouraging involvement in Citizens on Patrol, Citizen Police Academy, and Crime Watch to work collaboratively to reduce crime and promote crime prevention tools. 

• Maintain open lines of communication between residents, business owners and the police department by attending community meetings and events, including neighborhood association and other community meetings. 

• Recruit Citizen on Patrol volunteers, schedule them for training, and provide on-going training and correspondence to encourage and retain active memberships. 

Enter your address on http://oneaddress.fortworthtexas.gov/ You will find your BEAT and NPO assigned as well as your nearest City Facilities, Services, and Crime Data. 

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Connecting People and Services

No matter where you live in Texas, you can dial 2-1-1, or (877) 541-7905, and find information about resources in your local community. Whether you need help finding food or housing, child care, crisis counseling or substance abuse treatment, one number is all you need to know.

NPO Roster

Community News

LVT Rise Community Center

National Night Out Registration is Open!

Tuesday, October 6, 2026 

National Night Out is an annual community-building campaign that promotes police-community partnerships and neighborhood camaraderie to make neighborhoods safer, more caring places to live.

Submit your neighborhood’s registration for National Night Out. 

If you have questions or need help registering, contact West Division Crime Prevention Specialist Steve Mitsuhashi at (817) 392-4768 or email: Steve.Mitsuhashi@FortWorthTexas.gov 

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