The offer letter Eddie Garcia signed in May to remain Dallas’ police chief includes a provision that guarantees he remains the highest-paid top cop in Texas.
“The City is committed to paying you a base salary of $306,440.40 or the highest salary for a police chief of a Texas city with a population of over one million,” Interim City Manager Kimberly Tolbert wrote in the letter.
“If a police chief of a Texas city with a population of over one million receives a higher salary than your base salary, your salary will be increased to a higher salary that will take effect on the first uniformed pay period 30 days after the effective date of that police chief’s salary.”
The only other cities in Texas with populations of more than 1 million are Houston (2.3 million) and San Antonio (1.5 million). Former Houston Chief of Police Troy Finner’s salary when he retired in May was about $298,000, the Houston Chronicle reported. DX‘s requests for the salaries of Acting Chief Larry Satterwhite and San Antonio Chief of Police William McManus were not answered by press time.
DX reported on May 16 that Tolbert announced Garcia agreed to remain police chief through at least 2027.
“This was complicated, but we got it done,” she said in a statement. “If this was NFL Football, we were able to keep Chief Garcia on the Dallas Team; he’s the right quarterback to lead our police department. We certainly didn’t want to lose him to free agency.”
Garcia signed an “addendum” to the offer letter he received from the City of Dallas in December 2020. It keeps his annual salary at $306,440.40. But in November, he will begin receiving a retention bonus of $10,000 every six months through May 2027.
“I’m honored that the city has valued the work we’ve done together,” Garcia told The Dallas Morning News. “I’m tremendously grateful that City Manager Tolbert placed that provision in the agreement.”
Since his appointment in 2021, Garcia has implemented a violent crime reduction plan, overseen the development of a crime analytics dashboard, worked with state legislators to make it a felony to remove ankle monitors, tried to mend the relationship between police and residents, and worked to improve police response times.
Meanwhile, he has contended with a much smaller budget than other high-crime cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City: Dallas leaders allocated just $654 million to the city’s police department this fiscal year.