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According to a recent article in the Dallas Morning News, the Dallas PD’s fleet is in a remarkable state of disrepair. Recently, a Dallas police officer showed up for his normal shift and found no patrol car to drive – a scene mirrored in the final season of the HBO series, “The Wire.” While the agency has about 700 patrol cars, 210 of them were in the shop or otherwise out of service at the time this article was written.
There’s better days ahead, but the rank and file will have to wait for 240 new cars purchased recently that are sitting in a lot. Those units must be equipped and modified so they can be fitted with gadgets, racks and computers. The lack of working cruisers has been in issue in Dallas for years.
“It is a problem, especially like on a Saturday night,” Sgt. Richard Santiesteban, a board member of the National Latino Peace Officers Association, told the Dallas Morning News during a recent interview. “We’ve had problems with some of our officers just waiting around for a vehicle. And it seems like we just can’t get enough vehicles to help get our officers out there,” he added. The problem is better or worse depending on where in the city you work. In July at the southeast patrol division, 50 of the division’s allotted 105 cars were out of service.
“We have a bottleneck that we need to improve; we have to admit that,” David Brown, an assistant police chief on assignment as interim assistant city manager, told the News.
“We’re working to manage the fleet better,” he said. “We’re working to put police marked squad cars as more of a priority.” Part of the problem is understaffing in the department responsible for the city owned vehicles. That city agency currently has 39 vacancies out of 150 positions.
Mr. Brown said approval to fill 28 of the jobs has been received. He says the delay isn’t a function of the city’s hiring freeze but is due to serious difficulty finding mechanics. “We’ve been scouring the workforce trying to get qualified mechanics,” he told reporters with the Dallas Morning News. “They’re hard to come by.”
As the new cars wait to be outfitted with gear and sent into service, current police vehicles are getting older and more run down. Before 2001, squad cars were generally replaced when their odometers hit 80,000 miles. For the 2000-2001 budget year, to save about $1.2 million, the City Council voted to let cars run 100,000 miles.
In the 2002-2003 budget cycle, the guideline was 125,000 miles. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites        
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