The feds have embedded in northeast Dallas, and they swear they won’t leave before cleaning out the crime hot spots that make life miserable for neighbors — and the entire city more vulnerable.

Their initial target: a tiny convenience store just south of LBJ Freeway off Skillman Street.

If you think that’s an embarrassingly insignificant — or easy — first step, you don’t know J’s Food Mart, or similar establishments in crime-ridden pockets all over Dallas.

The parking lot at 10041 Whitehurst Drive has long been littered with people up to no good. Loitering. Open-air drug sales. Prostitution. High-stakes dice games late into the night. Shootings and armed robberies as the games break up.

The food mart is a perfect place for violence — and has been regardless of who has operated it over the years.

With fast getaway access to LBJ, J’s is nestled between a sketchy strip mall and a sea of anonymous apartment complexes. The trouble that starts outside the store regularly spills into full view of those 2,000 or so rental units.

In the morning, a prostitute walks naked down the street as parents take their kids to school; at night, random gunfire explodes through the windows of sleeping children whose bedrooms face Whitehurst.

Just a few blocks to the west sit expensive Lake Highlands homes, but on the other side of J’s, businesses lock their doors during daytime hours.

The surrounding community is sick and tired of this scene. So putting J’s Food Mart out of business would be a big momentum builder for the retooled Project Safe Neighborhoods, created under President George W. Bush.

U.S. Attorney Erin Nealy Cox’s office is leading the charge, with a big assist from Dallas Police Chief U. Renee Hall and her department. All the big guns, including FBI and ATF, are at the table.

Working from data analyzed by a TCU criminologist, the team pinpointed a section of Dallas east of North Central Expressway and largely south of LBJ Freeway as most in need of the feds’ help.

Just one week after the partners settled on their two-year mission, Dallas Police Officer Rogelio Santander was mortally wounded in a Home Depot shooting in the targeted area. The effort was immediately dedicated to Santander and renamed Operation Badge #10934.

Not only is this section of northeast Dallas among the most violent in the city, it’s home to a population especially vulnerable to crime — immigrants, refugees and a staggering number of children. The feds’ spadework indicates that many of the lawbreakers carving out their business here come from other parts of town.

That’s why you should care about the closure of J’s Food Mart: A significant, long-term anti-crime campaign in this section of the city should have a positive ripple effect everywhere.

That victory over 10041 Whitehurst was oh so close this week.

Assistant U.S. Attorney P.J. Meitl and his crew first laid down the law to property owner Sharon Crawford with tough talk about civil forfeiture when a business is facilitating criminal activity. She got the message and this week terminated the lease of the operator of J’s Food Mart, Jordan Abdul.

Abdul doesn’t seem like a bad guy, just someone who wants to be left alone to run his store. He says he’s done his best to tamp down the criminal element. Now he’s hired a lawyer and is fighting back.

Certainly, business tenants have rights. And this community deserves a convenience store. But not at this location, where it’s long been all but advertised as “do your illegal business here.”

Nealy Cox describes the scene like this: “It’s not a safe environment, and it’s just accepted that that’s how it is here. We can’t just accept that. That’s why we’re putting in place a long-lasting effort to create permanent change.”

Neighborhoods at the center of the effort — Vickery Meadow and Forest-Audelia, just north of J’s — have long bedeviled the Dallas Police Department. While cops can barely keep up with the whack-a-mole of 911 calls, the feds bring new enforcement tools, more boots on the ground and high hopes for success.

“What can we do in two years that allows the community to heal, to get stronger, to be less vulnerable?” Nealy Cox says. “If we can get the crime out here, we can use that model elsewhere.”

City Council member Adam McGough, who along with colleague Jennifer Staubach Gates, represents the targeted area, sees the effort as a chance to genuinely bridge the dense apartment neighborhoods with the sturdy residential ones: “We are all part of the same community. We all go to the same schools. We shop at many of the same places. But there are lines — here are the nice wonderful areas and here are the tough areas. That shouldn’t be the case.”

That’s why Project Safe Neighborhood doesn’t just want to eradicate crime, but also to rebuild community.

But first the feds must get J’s closed down.