From the 2006 Advocate story "What does it take to make one good cop?"

From the 2006 Advocate story “What does it take to make one good cop?” by Brent Flynn

David Kunkle was chief, David Brown was assistant chief, and Angela Hunt was on the city council asking the tough questions …

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As the Dallas Police Department this week addresses the city’s surge in crime and how to deal with it — Chief David Brown suggested moving the current staff around and adding members to special task forces, and there also are plans to bring in help from the state police.

Ten years ago, we published a story about the DPD, then under the charge of David Kunkle, and its complicated efforts to staff its force. When we published that story, crime was down, not up as it is now and the city had money to spend on new recruits. The problem was that finding the right men and women for the job was wrought with complexities.

From the Advocate, April 2006

Pull quote from the Advocate, April 2006

From the 2006 story:

“… The key is applicant flow, says Deputy Chief Floyd Simpson, who oversees recruitment for the department. Only one out of every 10 applicants makes it through the entire DPD screening and training process to become a Dallas police officer. He says increasing the number of applicants should translate to more police officers on the streets.

And Assistant Chief David Brown says spending more money on recruiting will yield more applicants, The average cost of recruiting and training a new officer is $62,000, so an additional $3 million a year in the DPD budget should buy 50 new officers. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The recruiting budget was increased last year, doubling the applicant pool, but because of higher standards put in place by Chief Kunkle, including disqualifying applicants with domestic abuse charges against them and those with inconclusive polygraph results, there was a net increase of only 18 officers.

From the April 2006 Lake Highlands Advocate

From the April 2006 Lake Highlands Advocate

“I would caution that it took us a while to get here, and so it will take a while to get out,” Simpson admits. “A lot of people think throwing a bunch of money at the problem will solve it. It’s simply not going to happen that way.” He wants to avoid what happened during previous recruitment initiatives in the early 1990s and 2000s when unqualified or poorly screened candidates made it onto the force. “One thing I do not want to do is make a hiring push and make hiring mistakes. If you follow my logic, incremental growth is the way to go.”

Since 2004, the City Council had increased the DPD budget to cover the cost of hiring 50 additional officers annually. But in 2005, recruiters were unable to meet even that modest goal.

Some on the council pointed to the recruiting shortfalls as proof that the city needed to work with what they had, but Angela Hunt, District 14 representative at the time, said “not so fast.”

“If we can’t recruit more than 50 officers a year,” she wanted to know, “the next question is why?”

That’s the question the story, which you can read in full here, explores. And how did what happened then impact the challenges we face now?