DALLAS, TX.- God Bless Texas! Or, at least Dallas.
Despite calls from the loud 1% who want to defund the Dallas Police Department, city manager T.C. Broadnax said that it was never his intention to reduce the city’s police budget, according to the Dallas Observer.
Rather, federal funding provided through the CARES Act passed by Congress, means that the police department could in fact see a small increase in funding for FY20-21.
It isn’t only that anti-police loudmouths who are seeking to defund the police. In June, 10 city council members authored a letter in which they asked Broadnax about decreasing funding to the department.
Broadnax said:
“I’ve said very clearly that [defunding the police] was not our mission or intention, particularly given the challenges we’ve historically had with hiring and the direction that the council had given,”
Rather than defunding the police, the city is looking at different ways to improve the police department. One such initiative is something called “R.E.A.L. Change,” which is an acronym for a policing model that is responsible, equitable, accountable, and legitimate.”
Mayor Eric Johnson said in the budget proposal that was unveiled on Friday:
“We can’t ask or expect law enforcement to do it all. When we’re faced with a problem, we come together as a city, and we solve it..”
Included within the budget are plans to improve police training in areas such as implicit bias, de-escalation techniques, and less-lethal tactics, while the city was also looking to put together teams outside the spectrum of law enforcement to assist the department in areas such as homelessness, mental health emergency calls, etc.
In order to staff the new mobile response team, the city would be looking to add $1.5 million and seven staff members to fund and staff the effort.
The new team was proposed by city council member Chad West, chair of the housing and homelessness solutions committee.
West said that discussions are ongoing about the form the response team would take.
There are also plans to add an intake specialist and mediation coordinator to the Office of Community Policy Oversight.
During the demonstrations, which have taken place in the Dallas area over the past couple of months, protesters have complained that increased training is an empty gesture due to the fact that similar programs are conducted in a number of police departments, however they allege that problems with abuse by law enforcement still persist.
Also included within the budget is an expansion of a program called RIGHT Care, which sends social workers on police calls to assist the mentally ill, thereby avoiding unnecessary hospitalizations, arrests, and interactions between police and those they are sworn to protect.
That program is still in a pilot stage in the South-Central division of the Dallas PD, however Broadnax noted that by the end of 2022, the plan is to have up to 10 teams in place.
The city is also hoping to allocate funds to support inmates released from jail and prison.
Broadnax says that he wants police to work as so-called “violence interrupters,” working with community organizations in the capacity of people who can “resolve conflict and stem violence from within their communities.”
These initiatives have been put in place off and on in Dallas neighborhoods over the years.
For example, last summer, community activists with Guerilla Mainframe and Black Empowerment Movement walked through the Highland Park Apartments, dealing with crime and homelessness. The groups made a deal with the owner of the complex—they would patrol the area, if they could have an apartment to stage their operations from.
They carried guns, and in fact had been shot at, however they never fired their weapons during the time they patrolled the apartment complex.
The primary part of their role was to keep homeless out of vacant apartment. When homeless were found inside apartments that were supposed to be empty, they removed them and did what they could to land them a job or find them somewhere else to stay.
Managers from various apartment complexes gather monthly at a local library for what amounts to a crime watch meeting. At those meetings, the managers receive crime statistics from the Dallas police. In the beginning, crime stats provided to, for example, the co-owner of the Highland Park Apartments would number four to five pages. At the end of the summer patrol by the activists, crime stats only took up half a page, they said.
While the activists said they had no desire to work with the police department, they said their actions were in part, a way to deal with what they believed to be long response times in their community.
Speaking of the proposed budget, one of the activists who helped lead the patrols, lamented the decision not to defund the police.
Yafeuh Balogun said:
“Dallas had an opportunity to be progressive and to defund the police. Instead, the city manager and leadership decided not to include funding reforms—same old Dallas,”
He continued:
However, Balogun said that he does support programs such as RIGHT Care. “Programs such as this can ensure the safety of first responders and the community,”
The Dallas PD has been dealing with staffing shortages for a while, and that problem has remained during the pandemic. Despite the fact that the coronavirus will affect class sizes for new recruits, the department is still looking to hire 150 new police officers
As part of that initiative, the city is proposing an increase in the minimum wage for employees to $15 an hour by FY 21-22.
At a June city council meeting, many people spoke out about defunding the police. One in particular, Kellie Barrett said:
“The current proposed budget allocates 60% of its funds to public safety, with 31% of [those funds] specifically going to the police. Totaling $542 million. Meanwhile, 23% of the children in Dallas County are food insecure.”
The City Council will be briefed on the budget proposal this week, and community budget discussion town halls will follow. A final vote on the budget will be forthcoming next month.
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