FAKE EMERGENCIESA Year Before Trumps Crime Rhetoric, Dallas Voted to Increase Police. The City Is Wrestling with the Consequences.
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. 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.
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, and growing the department’s size has been a goal of mayors, City Council members and police chiefs for decades. But violent crime here, as elsewhere nationally, is trending downward despite the growing claims by Trump and other leaders that certain cities are incapable of governing or policing themselves.
