Dallas’ new Police Chief Daniel Comeaux talked with council members on the Public Safety Committee on Monday about how he plans to better the department’s response times.
“It’s something that from day one I started looking at and getting a team together,” Comeaux said during the committee meeting. “We’re going over everything. We’re looking at how each call is labeled and prioritized, and one of the things that I’ve already learned is that it’s pretty much outdated. So, we need to really go over that again because what happened 20 years ago, it’s different now, so we need to make sure that things are classified the right way.”
New Dallas Police Chief Daniel Comeaux. Courtesy of a City of Dallas press release.
During his time leading the department so far, Comeaux has noticed that Dallas labels certain calls differently than other large cities.
“That might fix the problem statistically and datawise right there, so we’re doing a deep dive into that,” the chief said.
Comeaux also said he’s looking into how the department’s resources are utilized and is thinking of bringing together divisions that are doing the same things, which can increase patrol’s resources.
Dallas Police Department data from April was presented to the committee in a memo, and it showed that officers responded to Priority 1 calls in about 11 minutes last month. For the year to date, that number is closer to 12 minutes. These response times for Priority 1 calls are a little longer than last year, which in April 2024 were just under 11 minutes and over 10 minutes for last year to date.
For calls of lesser priority, the response times from this year and last year range from over an hour to about four or five hours.
This is especially relevant to our neighborhood in East Dallas as a report from NBC DFW found that two boys, who were hit by a car while riding their bikes on a Vickery Boulevard sidewalk last month, had to wait over four hours for police to arrive and investigate. Firefighters and ambulance crews showed up relatively quickly, according to NBC’s report.
The good news is that recruiting efforts have increased by 36% at DPD since the last fiscal year, and overall violent crime in Dallas has decreased 14.26%, according to reports given during the committee meeting. DPD plans to hire 300 officers for the fiscal year.
