The City Took Over Some Non-Emergency Services For More Efficiency at DPD

As the Dallas Police Department continues to struggle with staffing shortages, the city is looking for more ways to lighten cops’ workloads. One of the principal strategies has been something called civilianization, hiring non-sworn personnel to handle lower-priority tasks that police officers don’t necessarily need to do. In a similar effort, Dallas is transferring some non-emergency law enforcement responsibilities to city staff.

The idea behind these approaches is that we don’t need to use police for everything, especially when departments across the country are struggling to reach adequate staffing levels. Since 2014, DPD is down some 500 officers. Many left in 2016 and 2017, when the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System was in crisis. A lack of infrastructure, like an adequate police academy to train recruits, as well as better salaries at suburban police departments, has contributed to Dallas’ struggle to hire enough officers.

The shortages, in Dallas at least, have contributed to longer response times. The city may be able to speed things up by diverting some police duties to its staff.

“To increase efficiencies in the Dallas Police Department and decrease response time for city services, City Council directed staff to identify opportunities to divert non-emergency services provided by DPD to other departments,” Assistant City Manager Robert Perez wrote in a Dec. 16 memo to the mayor and City Council. “Two of the non-emergency services identified for diversion were parking violations and non-emergency vehicle street blockages on city-owned streets.”

Since August, the city’s Department of Transportation has been taking care of parking violations in Dallas, a task previously performed by DPD. According to the city’s 311 dashboard, which tracks calls for service and the responding department, 66 reported parking violations have been handled by the Department of Transportation since it took over enforcement. The dashboard doesn’t appear to track reports of street blockages by non-emergency vehicles. During that same period, DPD responded to 27 reports of chronic traffic violations, according to the dashboard.

Starting Jan. 3, the Department of Transportation’s parking enforcement division will start assisting DPD with non-emergency vehicle street blockages. Initially, city staff will respond to street blockages from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m., and DPD will take care of the rest of the day. Eventually, though, the Department of Transportation will take over this responsibility completely. At that point, all street blockage calls will be transferred to 311. DPD will still cover street blockages on freeways or other high-speed roadways. These moves by the city were laid out in last year’s budget.

In 2019, the consulting firm KPMG studied staffing at DPD and recommended the use of more civilian employees. The study found at the time that DPD’s civilian employees made up only 16% of its staff. Other departments in the area had higher numbers of civilian employees. For example, a quarter of the Fort Worth Police Department’s staff were civilian employees, according to the KPMG study. “The goal (of using civilian investigators) is increased efficiency — to relieve sworn investigators of the low-priority or less complex cases so that they can devote more time to solving felony crimes,” the report said.

The city identified 95 sworn positions at DPD that it wanted replaced with civilian employees. These include positions in DPD’s legal department, in record-keeping and at the auto pound, Kristin Lowman, a spokesperson for the department, said. Lowman said the goal is for civilian employees to make up at least 18% of the department. DPD will be hosting hiring events early next year at which people can apply for some of these positions.

The transfer of parking violation and street blockage enforcement doesn’t add any civilian employees to DPD’s staff, but it could lighten officers’ workload so they can spend more time on higher-priority calls for service.

“The hope is by having professional staff take on duties that don’t require a sworn police officer it will help free up members of patrol on these types of calls and enforcement and allow them to focus on patrol, answer higher-priority calls, and focus on major initiatives like violent crime reduction,” Lowman said. “The department is constantly monitoring and looking at ways to improve service throughout the city of Dallas.”