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This article is co-published with WFAA and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.
Reporting Highlights
- Growing Force: Despite drops in violent crime last year, a nonprofit called Dallas HERO convinced voters to approve a measure requiring the city to grow its police force to 4,000.
- Who They Are: Dallas HERO’s leaders have included hotel owner and GOP donor Monty Bennett and Pete Marocco, whom Trump picked to run the U.S. Agency for International Development.
- Service Cuts: The Dallas City Council voted to change its police hiring standards and added money for 350 new officers, but also cut funding to some libraries and city pools.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
The year before President Donald Trump announced he was sending National Guard troops and federal agents into major cities like Washington, D.C., and Chicago, declaring crime out of control, a Dallas nonprofit made a similar case for putting more police on the streets.
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” Trump said at an Aug. 11 press conference, announcing the unprecedented federal takeover of the Washington police force and the deployment of the National Guard to the city.
A year earlier, a man named Pete Marocco told Dallas City Council members that Dallas was descending into comparable anarchy.
“We cannot wait until Dallas looks like other degenerate cities that have made irreversible mistakes, devaluing their police force and destroying their city center,” said Marocco, who would go on to briefly lead the U.S. Agency for International Development under Trump.
At that time, Marocco was speaking as the executive director of a nonprofit called Dallas HERO, whose leaders wanted voters to pass propositions that would radically overhaul the city’s charter. One of them, a ballot measure known as Proposition U, would force Dallas to grow its police force to 4,000 officers, and significantly raise their starting pay, in order to address the kind of lawlessness Marocco claimed the city was experiencing.
Voters went on to narrowly pass the proposition in the same November election that put Trump back in the Oval Office. They also approved another “citizen enforcement” measure Dallas HERO got onto the ballot, Proposition S, which gave residents the right to more easily sue the city to block policies and have them declared unlawful by stripping Dallas of its immunity from litigation. The measure makes Dallas the first city in the country to lose its governmental immunity, legal experts said.
Few people in Dallas dispute that more police are needed; 911 call response times have increased in recent years,