Dallas is ready to raise the bar for police recruiters, but what's reasonable?
Dallas city leaders are looking to raise expectations for police recruiters amid pressure to add more officers to the department.
The city has an annual set goal of hiring 250 officers. It hasn't always succeeded in hitting that measure, but last year it did – hiring 253 officers. This fiscal year, which runs through the end of September, interim Chief Michael Igo said the department is on track to hire around 300 new officers.
Council member Cara Mendelsohn, though, who chairs the city's public safety committee, said the department needs to be aiming higher. She points out, that while the city's population has grown over the last decade, its police force has shrunk. It takes longer – an average of almost 11 minutes now – for officers to respond to its highest priority calls.
Last November, voters made their opinion clear, passing an amendment requiring the city to maintain a force of four thousand officers, almost 900 more than it currently has.
"The rest of the city knows this is a crisis. Somehow, in this building, people don't seem to get this," Mendelsohn said during Monday's monthly committee meeting.
Her proposal, though, was met with disagreement from others who warned it wasn't realistic.
"You don't order a Dallas police officer off of Amazon," said council member Gay Donnell Willis.
"I'll have to adjust resources," said Igo.
Igo said the department right now simply doesn't have enough recruiters or people doing background checks to support hiring much more than 300 people this fiscal year. Pulling staff from other departments to help with those roles, he warned, could cause other problems and impact the department's other goals, including a decrease in response times.
"Either from a patrol perspective or investigative or support, when I have to take numbers from those locations, it's going to impact those units or groups," said Igo.
Mendelsohn likened raising the goal to the department's hiring goal to 300, a number it already anticipates meeting, to doing nothing.
In a split vote, the committee chose to recommend a hiring goal of 325 – a number the chief says will still require him to shuffle staff.
The city council as a whole will still need to vote on this.
