City Councilman Lee Kleinman says, ask the taxpayers.
The point was to show how serious, and united, Dallas police are when it comes to officer pay in the next city budget. The diverse group (Dallas Police Association, Black Police Association, Hispanic Police Association, Dallas Firefighters Association) filled the city council chambers on the sixth floor to standing room only.
Friday, City Manager A.C. Gonzales will hold a press conference to discuss the 2017 budget and what he has in store for the police.
Despite private security patrols and burglar alarms, crime plagues us. In fact, the reason I think we are seeing larger garages is for security. Leave your car on your street, you wake up to busted glass.
“We are losing officers,” says Ron Pinkston, president of the Dallas Police Association. “We are down to 3,380 police officers from a high of 3750 over the last few years.”
Fewer police means they are spread out more, and customer service or patrolling stumbles. There are fewer to take a bite out of crime.
Oh and those “500” people who the media said signed up after July’s police ambush, prompted by Chief Brown? Pinkston says in reality, 150 showed up, out of which 10 to 15 could actually make it to the street as potential officers.
Here is the problem: It costs $150,000 to train a police recruit. Once officers get trained on the city’s tab, they leave for surrounding communities for higher pay. Dallas currently pays starting officers $44,600 a year. Here is a sampling of starting salaries in neighboring communities:
Fort Worth: $54,000
Grand Prairie: $56,000
Plano: $63,000
The median is about $52,500, says Pinkston, who lives in Rockwall. Many DPD live in the suburbs, where home prices are lower and public schools rated higher.
“I went to Baton Rouge for the funeral there,” says Pinkston, “One well trained career officer tells me, ‘Ron I’m leaving in January. I’m tired of this game, they don’t care about us, I’m going into private industry”
Pinkston asks why we are not making public safety a top priority?
Some City Council members have told him their constituents would rather beef up, and finance, enhanced private security patrols in their own ‘hoods.
But that creates islands of crime.
City Councilman Lee Kleinman may have been abrasive, but he says he is listening. His first allegiance, he says, is to the taxpayers.
Earlier this week (Tuesday) when those officer groups tried to visit Kleinman in his office, the chat may have been the shortest on record. Since the association heads had their lobbyist with them, Kleinman queried as to whether said lobbyist was registered with the city, as city protocol dictates.
After a heated exchange, the group leaders left his office saying, well, that was shorter than we thought it would be.
“There is only so much money coming into the city,” says Kleinman. “I’m not going to blindly sign up to their plan. If the taxpayers decide they want to move funds from, say, street and road repair, or somewhere, to police, fine.”
Police and fire already consume 64% of the Dallas City budget, says Kleinman. Pinkston says the national average is closer to 68%.
What do the voters say? Street repairs and potholes were the number one priority in the last community survey, says Kleinman. And as I said a few days ago, there are a lot of hands out down at City Hall: education, homeless, wild dogs, code compliance, economic development for South Dallas, and potholes.
I asked, what about the windfall from the increased value in property taxes, the extra cash we are all going to have to choke up next January?
It’s roughly $60 million, says Kleinman. $34 to $35 million of that is already going to public safety, $20 million to other obligations, but there may be a few shekels left.
City manager A.C. Gonzalez has come up with a way to increase the starting salary of young police recruits without bumping up the entire police salary step structure, and throwing the system out of whack. But the older, more experienced members of the force resent missing that pay bump.
“We want to make sure no one’s left behind; all officers are taken care of,” says Pinkston.
“Our top police are paid well,” says Kleinman, “It’s the beginners who need a boost.”
He also told me that DPD has slightly lower qualifications for beginning officers. A college degree is not required, as it is in some surrounding (and higher-paying) suburban forces. Neither is a peace license. So we hire rookies, invest $100 to $150k in training, then they leave after a few years of experience.
Basically, Dallas foots the training bill for suburban police.
I wondered why we don’t just have the same standards the suburbs have, and increase starting salaries. Because, says Kleinman, DPD says it likes training its police force in the “Dallas way”.
Which is just what frustrates Pinkston: losing the older officers robs the younger ones of experience training.
Then there’s the pension.
“We once had a pension that attracted officers despite the lower pay,” says Pinkston. “Now we have a pension in turmoil, and the worst health benefits in state.”
And just lost 210 veteran officers to retirement.
Kleinman says he gets it, but he would rather hear it from the taxpayers.
I said, buyers are interested in three basic things when they buy a home: safety, education, and quality of neighborhood. Like where you can leave your car out at night and not wake up to a burglary. If you want people to buy homes in Dallas over the suburbs, we’d better keep it safe.
Kleinman says we are making progress, but we need to back the Chief. As of now, three City Council members have not even signed a memo supporting the Chief’s community policing policy: Kingston, Griggs and Clayton.
“I support the rank and file, but the leadership of the Dallas Police Association doesn’t have a lot of credibility with me after they tried to get our Chief fired,” he says.
Maybe, post July 7, it’s time for another community survey.
