Dallas’ largest police association urged voters Monday to reject a trio of charter amendment propositions — including one supporters say will significantly boost officers’ numbers, pay and benefits — saying it fears the proposals would cause more harm than good.
Dallas Police Association president Jaime Castro said his organization wasn’t consulted about Dallas Hero’s S, T and U propositions, and after reviewing them, its board felt they would negatively impact the police department and residents.
A proposal to force the city to make officers’ starting pay and benefits among the top in North Texas ignores tenured officers and could further hamper recruitment, he said. Mandating an increase of around 900 officers to keep a minimum of at least 4,000 would likely strain the city’s budget, force the department to relax its standards to meet the mandate and force cuts to basic services to maintain them, Castro added.
“Budgeting for this level of hiring would not make the city safer, and it would spell doomsday for the city budget,” said Castro from the Dallas Police Association’s headquarters near City Hall. “Parks, streets, libraries and other city services improve our quality of life and contribute to a safer city.”
Calls to reject the propositions also came from Black activists and clergymen. They were part of another news conference outside the Dallas Police Department headquarters Monday afternoon.
Proposition S would require the city to waive its governmental immunity to allow any resident to file a lawsuit alleging the municipal government isn’t complying with the charter, local ordinances or state law.
Proposition T would require Dallas to conduct an annual survey of at least 1,400 residents, rating the city manager’s performance on addressing crime, homelessness, litter, panhandling and the condition of streets. The consequences of the results would range from the City Council approving a financial bonus equal to the city manager’s base salary to termination.
Proposition U would require the City Council to approve setting aside at least 50% of any excess yearly revenue for the police and fire pension system, increase the police force by 900 and mandate the city maintain a minimum of 4,000 officers while increasing police starting pay and other benefits to among the highest in North Texas.
Pete Marocco, executive director of Dallas Hero, said he expected the Dallas Police Association to side with the Fire Fighters Association in opposing the propositions. He said the City Council threatened to eliminate parity pay between the two public safety agencies. He said he believes many rank-and-file officers support the proposals.
Castro said Monday no one from the police association had been threatened by any city official related to the organization’s stance on the Dallas Hero propositions.
”Propositions S, T, U are by the people for the people and neither the opposition nor City Hall has any proposals to fix the drastically depleted police ranks, just threats and more violation of the law,” Marocco said, referring to three charter proposals the Dallas City Council initially approved, propositions K, M and N, designed to cancel out the Dallas Hero proposals.
The Texas Supreme Court in September ordered the council to remove the counter amendments, saying none of them clearly told voters their approval would nullify the Dallas Hero proposals.
The announcement Monday, the first day of early voting for the Nov. 5 election, means the city’s largest representatives of police and firefighters formally oppose S, T, and U. Dallas Hero, the nonprofit group that led a voter signature drive to get all three proposals on the election ballot, has said the charter updates are necessary to improve residents’ public safety and increase ways they can hold public officials accountable.
Many of the concerns raised by Castro have been echoed in recent weeks by a bevy of current and former city leaders, including the entire City Council, at least a dozen former City Council members — including four former mayors — and other elected, civic and business leaders who’ve called the three amendments flawed and likely detrimental to future city budgets and future spending of taxpayers’ money.
The Dallas Fire Fighters Association and Black Police Association of Greater Dallas have also opposed all three amendments.
DFA President Lt. Jeff Patterson said the city’s contract with the police and fire associations has a mechanism to keep pay competitive and reflective of the market. The starting pay for a Dallas police officer and firefighter is currently $70,314. Starting Jan. 1, the starting pay for both positions will be $75,397.
He described Proposition U as the “most damaging for fire and police,” fearing it could jeopardize the city’s contract with the public safety associations.
“There is no plan on how to pay for the increases or how they would be implemented, which could lead to cuts from firefighter pay to afford the police pay,” Patterson told The Dallas Morning News.
The Dallas Police Department is the highest-funded city agency, making up 38% of Dallas’ $1.9 billion general fund and 14% of the city’s overall $4.97 billion budget.
DPD’s $719 million budget covers nearly 3,100 officers and more than 600 civilian employees in a city with 1.3 million residents.
Interim City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert estimated during an Aug. 7 City Council meeting that it would cost the city at least $175 million to hire, train and equip 900 new officers.
“Overall, you would be looking at drastic, very extreme cuts that we would have to make across the board,” Tolbert told council members.
Other concerns are the city could lose out on quality candidates for its ongoing city manager search because of the prospect of getting fired over survey results, and the city would have to spend more to fend off an increase in lawsuits, which could include suits if the department doesn’t have 900 officers quickly enough.
“After a thorough review of these amendments, we know that if approved, these items would negatively impact the residents in our city and our department,” Castro said.
Dominique Alexander, a Dallas activist who leads the nonprofit Next Generation Action Network and called a separate news conference Monday afternoon, told The News he was critical of how the ballot propositions were crafted and advertised. Alexander has been a critic of public safety initiatives in the past and has had brushes with the justice system.
“I think it’s time for us to call out and call it what it is,” Alexander said, adding that he was critical of hotelier Monty Bennett’s influence on the propositions. Bennett, a major Republican donor and publisher of The Dallas Express, is the only prominent donor of the Dallas Hero proposals who has been identified.
Dallas Hero says it is a 501(c)4 nonprofit, which means it isn’t legally required to disclose its donors. Its officials have repeatedly declined to disclose the identity of any of its donors other than Bennett.
At a time when the city has struggled to meet its recruitment goals, the ballot propositions may force it to lower its hiring standards to meet the goal of hiring 900 more police officers, a scenario that Alexander said his organization has worked to prevent for the past decade.
“We maintain those standards so that we don’t get officers that killed Sonya Massey,” he said. “What we have seen time and time again in law enforcement is when standards are not looked at, we get people with badges that don’t need them.”
Massey, a Black woman from Illinois, was shot in her home by police officers. The officer, Sean Grayson, was indicted by a grand jury after a review of body-camera footage showed Massey had ducked and apologized right before Grayson shot her three times.
Ultimately, diverting money to the public safety budget without ensuring other services remain untouched could be detrimental to law enforcement officers themselves, Alexander said.
“We always say that law enforcement officers are not dog catchers,” he said. But if critical departments like the animal services department or code compliance are downsized or closed, he added, then their jobs will ultimately become police issues. “The only thing that’s going to address hard-hit areas that continue to contribute to violence is when we really address the socioeconomic [factors] and when we strongly put the economics into those areas,” he said.
One of the other things he pointed out was what he referred to as deceptive tactics the Dallas Hero initiative employed to get residents to sign the petition. Alexander said he was asked by former state representative and Dallas Hero honorary chair Stefani Carter in January to throw his support behind the ballot propositions.
The News reviewed emails where Carter sent Alexander documents with ballot language to “reform police.” One of the ways to reform police would be introducing regulations that would ban chokeholds. That was in January of this year.
“Many people in the city of Dallas were stopped thinking that they were signing a petition to ban chokeholds,” Alexander said.
The final ballot propositions make no mention of these initiatives.
