Last November, Dallas voters delivered a clear mandate to the Dallas City Council with the passage of Proposition U: public safety is a priority, and rising crime demands action. Unfortunately, nine months later, city council officials have not demonstrably moved forward on any attempt to fulfill the voters’ will and uphold the law to hire more police. The obstruction must end.
Dallas HERO is the citizen-led non-profit that spearheaded the successful campaign for Prop U. Our strategy was simple: highlight the troubling trends in our city’s crime and homelessness rates, which validated the everyday experiences of Dallasites, and offer Proposition U as a viable, grassroots solution. With Prop U now law, city leadership is required to hire roughly 900 more police officers, a move which will help reduce crime, stem outward family migration, and restore our city’s social fabric and trust.
We have been working tirelessly to ensure Dallas leaders comply with the new law, and we have been met with nothing but resistance. City leadership says they need until 2029 to fully staff the police department. This is a stall tactic; the law demands certain actions that will accelerate hiring, and there are additional commonsense steps they can take to uphold the will of their constituents. Here are the three most important:
1) Comply with Proposition U’s Police Pay Mandate
Starting pay for new Dallas Police cadets ranks near the bottom of all DFW metroplex cities, while the job comes with more dangerous work environments. To staff the Dallas Police Department at the level required by law, Dallas police pay must be raised.
The law requires the City of Dallas to raise officer pay to be among the most competitive within the region, necessitating a third-party survey of regional police department compensation. Despite numerous inquiries to the police department, the city manager, and the city council, we have been given no indication whether this survey has been conducted or if any efforts are being made to raise officer pay.
2) Transfer Funds to Police and Fire Pension
To further increase hiring competitiveness in the region, the City of Dallas is now required to allocate 50% of excess year-over-year revenue toward the Police and Fire Pension. In our calculations, that would have amounted to over $32.5 million last year. To date, nothing has been made publicly available to indicate any mandated funds have been transferred to the pension. City attorneys claim they are in compliance, yet offered no transparency or accountability, flatly refusing to let us verify their assertions.
3) Provide Access to General Ledger
To accurately verify their claims, Dallas HERO requires access to the city’s general ledger—the comprehensive accounting document detailing all taxpayer-funded financial transactions. Denying citizens access to this critical public information is at best unusual, at worst, illegal. Since March 2024, numerous open records requests have been denied, with city leadership even ludicrously claiming the general ledger doesn’t exist. This lack of transparency is unacceptable.
We will not back down from holding our city government accountable—a central tenet of our mission. City leadership’s resistance is precisely the kind of skullduggery that has undermined Dallas residents for years. It has always been our hope that we could collaborate in good faith to implement the changes voters demanded. But that requires meeting together, having honest conversations, and most importantly, transparency.
Our goodwill is running thin. If the city doesn’t change its tune and demonstrate a willingness to obey the law, Dallas HERO will have no choice but to resolve the matter in court—at great expense to the city (and thus, the taxpayers). We further call on every reader who cares about public safety and government accountability to contact City Manager Kim Tolbert, Mayor Eric Johnson, and each member of the City Council to demand compliance with the law.
We cannot have a thriving, safe city when government officials ignore the law—or believe they’re above it.