Dallas voters narrowly passed Proposition U, a new city charter that mandates the Texas city maintain a police force of at least 4,000 cops, an increase of about 900 positions. It’s unclear when the city will complete the “monumental task,” reports The Dallas Morning News, in a piece reprinted by Governing. To fund the city’s police and fire pension system, hiring more cops and boosting officers’ starting pay, the charter provision also requires Dallas to direct at least 50 percent of excess yearly revenue to the efforts -- a projected $37.5 million in revenue in its first year, Janette Weedon, the city’s budget director, told The Dallas Morning News in October. Many current and former elected officials and city leaders united to urge voters to reject the proposition, warning the changes would tie up the city and drain its financial resources. But the messaging did not resonate with voters who were drawn by the idea of a concrete requirement that forces the city to hire more cops to meet public safety needs.
Criminologists say Dallas is now in uncharted territory — while cities often set hiring goals, mandates of this scale are uncommon. The 4,000-officer figure borrows from the police department’s previous goals. City officials in 2015 said an analysis showed effective staffing levels were about three officers for every 1,000 residents. But prioritizing speed of hiring over quality of candidates could lead to problems that may make recruiting and retaining 4,000 officers difficult long-term, experts say. Other uncalculated costs — such as boosting cops’ mental health resources, community outreach initiatives, personnel supervision and ongoing training — would have to be factored in as more officers are hired. Hiring standards also are in question. For instance, should the department disqualify officers who smoked marijuana as teens? Do all officers need some college credits? And, most importantly, how are the officers deployed when hired? Alex Piquero, a professor of criminology at the University of Miami and former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, said he’s never seen propositions such as the one in Dallas. The number of officers matters less, he said, than how they police. “Everybody wants police,” Piquero said. “There’s no doubt about it. Even the most high-crime neighborhoods do. The question is, how do you put the police there, and how do you have them do their job and interact with the community? … I hope that that’s the guiding light.”
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