Dallas Police Chief Resigning

It was announced that Dallas’s chief of police, U. Reneé Hall, will be resigning effective at the end of the year, according to a statement issued by the City of Dallas on Tuesday. City of Dallas Manager T.C. Broadnax accepted Hall’s letter of resignation, which earlier indicated she would resign on November tenth. However, the manager requested that Hall to stay on all the way through the end of the year, til December 31st.

“This year has been tumultuous and uncertain. A few more months of (Hall’s) leadership are key for several projects and for a smooth transition within the police department,” Broadnax wrote in the official statement. “In her 3 years of service, Chief Reneé Hall has provided consistently passionate, resilient and strong leadership to our City. She has instituted a host of reforms that will assist our department as we move forward.”

Broadnax said he would announce the process to search for a new police chief when it was developed.

“These past three years have been filled with a series of unimaginable events that singly and cumulatively have never happened in Dallas,” Reneé Hall wrote in her letter of resignation. “I’m proud that this police department has not only handled multiple unusual events, but we also achieved the implementation of vital reforms that are necessary for us to meet our twenty-first-century policing goals.”

Selected from a list of prime candidates in 2017, Hall was the first female chief to head up the Dallas Police Department, which is the ninth-largest in the United States.

When Hall accepted the first officer role in Dallas she left behind more than twenty years of history with the Police Department in Detroit and she said she was “honored to be chosen to lead the Dallas Police Department at this critical time in its history.”

Hall was severely criticized this year for the department’s response to Black Lives Matter and related social inequity protests in Dallas sparked by the death of George Floyd just as summer got underway.

While Chief Hall was critized by some in the community who felt the police went too far in rounding up protesters and arresting them, and in the decision to use tear gas, Hall was likewise praised by many citizens and business owners who were horrified as unruly elements among protesters used the demonstrations in order to vandalize, steal, and commit acts of violence.

The unrest and conflict involving the protests also came in an unprecedented year where psychological and economic tensions were brought to their peak by the COVID-19 pandemic. It was quite clear that such unusual stressors were in large part responsible for increases in crime — not just in Dallas but in multiple other major cities and communities.

Dallas’s Mayor, Eric Johnson, stated that he was not surprised by the Chief Hall’s decision to step down.

“I know that people who commit themselves to careers as police officers face immense challenges and must be willing to make tremendous sacrifices. We demand much from them and especially from our police leaders — and rightfully so because the stakes are incredibly high,” Johnson said in a statement. “On top of those demands, Chief Hall had the burden and the distinction of being the first woman — a woman of color, no less — to serve as the police chief in Dallas. That was not lost on me. I wish her the best in her career and in her life moving forward.”

Before moving to Dallas, Hall had provided an interview in Detroit with News Channel NBC5’s Scott Friedman and said she intended to have Dallas officers in her new department become more involved in the communities, engaging in various service projects, helping to feed homeless people, and working with disadvantaged teens, because “officers cannot police a community that they do not understand.”

Hall began her tenure in September of 2017 and wasted no time shuffling the department’s command staff saying, “I don’t believe you hired me from the outside to just preserve the status quo.” However, the reorganization was not popular with all, and it created some tension between the chief and her new staff.

“Some of those individuals who were essentiall demoted were the most highly-respected, and most well-liked commanders in the administration,” stated the Dallas Police Association President, Mike Mata.

Her department biography said the moves were made to, “transform the department to reflect 21st century policing by streamlining the department’s organizational structure to improve efficient workflow between units, and strengthen effective policy processes.”

Hall’s reorganization did not initially halt the flow of officers resigning from the department, a situation that had begun long before her appointment as Chief. The department did whatever they could to increase recruiting, but still the numbers of officers shrank as she implemented her five strategic priorities: Crime reduction, increasing recruitment, advanced officer development, improved organizational effectiveness and enhanced community relationships.

With the challenge of a shrinking number of officers on the street, Hall made an optimistic promise to the people of Dallas: “Every resident in the city of Dallas will feel the love, will feel the respect, will know that community engagement is paramount. Crime reduction is on the horizon. It’s coming.”

She wasn’t wrong and crime did initially drop in the first few months of her tenure. But by the summer of 2018, crime was once again on the rise (just as has been the case with other major cities in recent times) and members of the city council began to push for improvements. Within another year, in the summer of 2019, the department’s crime statistics showed violent crime up 18% year-over-year with a 26% increase in homicides, a 22% increase in robberies and a 21% increase in assaults. At the same time, the police department statistics showed a 20% drop in sexual assaults. The Dallas Police Department was reportedly short 600 police officers in 2017 when Hall took over as leader, so it was highly challenging to make a dent in the statistics, regardless of the progressive and promising policy change strategies she implemented.

Hall’s tenure does have its highlights, one of which is her passion for community outreach service which was demonstrated when she delivered Christmas gifts to a 27-year-old woman’s children who had been killed in a robbery at an Oak Cliff discount shop. Sporting bright Santa hats, Hall and a few other officers carried box after box of gifts into the family’s home just days before Christmas.

“This is a family that needed us, that needed our support,” Hall said at the time. “So I definitely wanted to wrap my arms around this particular family.”

Though her time as police chief was brief, Hall steered the department through a number of tragic events, including the deaths of officer Rogelio Santander, (fatally shot during a robbery in April of 2018, and Senior Corporal Earl Jamie Givens, who was hit by an allegedly drunk driver while he was participating in a motorcycle funeral escort for police officer Tyrone Andrews in July of 2018.

Hall succeeded David Brown, who served as the Dallas Chief of Police from 2010 through 2016.

In her resignation letter, Hall wrote that she was considering a “number of inquiries about future career opportunities,” but declined to disclose her next career move.