Dallas Police Department Drops College Requirement for Applicants

DALLAS — Dallas police applicants no longer need higher education to make the force.

The City Council on Wednesday unanimously approved changing police hiring standards to include applicants without prior college experience.

The move is the latest attempt by the city to boost recruitment amid a charter mandate approved by Dallas voters in November requiring a police force of at least 4,000 officers. Department officials in early June said Dallas has 3,215 officers.

Dallas already requires applicants for police officer trainees to be between the ages of 19 and 45, be legally able to drive in Texas and have an honorable discharge from any completed military service.

The new rule adds a minimum qualification for entry-level Dallas police officer applicants who are at least 21 years old: hold a high school diploma or a GED and have three years of steady, full-time work experience.

“What we’re looking for is good people who have stable working history, who have shown progression, that are mature, responsible applicants to become police officers,” Assistant Police Chief Israel Herrera told council members.

He mentioned Dallas modeled the new rule after Houston, which has a similar stipulation of three years of full-time work. Herrera later said the city would partner with the University of North Texas at Dallas to allow recruits to earn up to 45 college credit hours for academic work they complete at the Dallas Police Academy.

The proposal had been backed by the Dallas Civil Service Board, which oversees city employment rules and regulations, and the council’s public safety committee.

If applicants can’t hit the new criteria, they can meet one of four other existing qualifications instead: have at least 45 hours of college credits, have three years of certified law enforcement experience, have an active license with Texas’ law enforcement regulatory agency or have three years of active military service with an honorable discharge.

City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert described the rule change as a pilot and said city officials would review the data in a year to see if it has any impact on the police hiring pool.

A motion from council member Adam Bazaldua to lower the work experience requirement to two years failed. The South Dallas representative said he felt the three-year requirement could be its own roadblock for the applicant pool. The Austin Police Department allows applicants who are at least 20 years old with a high school diploma or GED, and two years’ full-time work experience over the last three years since they’ve applied.

“I don’t necessarily think that from 18 years old to 21 years old, expecting there to be 36 months of consecutive employment history is realistic,” Bazaldua said. “And so if the intent of this is to remove barriers, I’m hoping that we can make this policy change actually be something that removes barriers and opens up better opportunities.”

But the idea was rejected by the majority of the council, who felt three years was a necessary filter to weed out people who may not be mature enough to understand the responsibility of being a police officer.

“We’re not talking about clerical jobs here; we’re talking about police officers who have guns and are out in public,” said council member Paul Ridley.

“If we’re going to eliminate the college requirement, we at least have to have an employment requirement that shows that they are focused and reliable and will show up.”

For the last few years, Dallas has set yearly police hiring goals of 250 new officers, but have largely missed the mark until last year. At the same time, the department loses nearly as many cops as it hires annually.

The City Council last fall approved 250 as the hiring target again for this fiscal year, which runs from October to September. But elected officials raised the goal to 300 in February after being assured by then-interim Police Chief Michael Igo that it was a target the department could meet.

Herrera said Wednesday the police department appeared to still be on track to hire at least 300 new officers by the end of September.

Police data shown to City Council members during a June 3 public safety committee meeting showed the department reported hiring 201 new officers since Oct. 1 while losing 108.

Having 4,000 officers would be an all-time high for Dallas, which has a population of 1.3 million residents. The city had nearly 3,700 cops in 2010, when the population was a little less than 1.2 million.

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