Dallas City Council to reexamine pay raises for police

The Dallas City Council is expected on Wednesday to once again try to find a way to give Dallas police officers more incentives.

A police lieutenant told FOX4 said he’s growing increasingly concerned about the revolving door in the department.

Lt. Earnest Sherman said he’s counted 181 officers who left the department in their first five years. He said the loss to the city in training costs for that is about $29 million.

“We're not running just regional academy for all the suburbs, we're running a state academy,” Sherman said.

He says Dallas police officers went to 147 different police departments around the state in the past five years.

Councilwoman Jennifer Staubach Gates noted the issue last week.

“We've had 9 officers leave as quickly as two days, six days, five days, six months, three months, 40 days, five months,” Gates said.

The reason -- higher pay in other cities. The impact -- longer police response times in Dallas.

Sherman has been with DPD for 28 years and he's seen at lot of changes.

“1990 I came on the department, we did not go from call to call to call, we had time to be proactive,” Sherman said.

Now he says even being reactive is a challenge.

"People who come to the station say, I waited so long,” Sherman said.

He's worried that longer response times for lower priority calls may prompt some people to simply give up on making reports about a car or home burglaries. That means important clues could be lost.

“You have someone running around doing all these crimes, he may be caught, but at that point only charged with one or two crimes, the crimes he's caught doing, all the rest don't get charged to him, he's just out there,” Sherman said.

The question for council members is where to get money for raises without relying on higher taxes. It's clear from recent there will be no easy answers.

"I don't know why we seem compelled to oppress our residents with more and more taxes,” councilman Lee Kleinman said last week.

A proposal to use money slated for economic development to fund the raises failed at a previous meeting. A new compromise is reportedly in the works and could be unveiled on Wednesday.