I understand where you are coming from and I agree with you to a certain extent. You are preaching to the choir about salary and manpower. The problem with dissolving the PD would be that DART would end up dissolving as well. Local PDs have enough on their plate without dealing with the issues from the transit system. With all of the local PDs being undermanned as well, that would just get their departments up to full staffing and would not address the issues with the transit system. You have to understand that the DART Police Department strictly focuses on DART problems or problems related to the transit system. With that, DART patrons have come to expect certain benefits of DART having it's own police force. Local PDs would still not have the resources to contend with the call volume that comes from disturbances on buses, trains, and transit centers. DART patrons know that we are there to help and protect them, even though we may need more officers. On top of that, DART patrons would fade from the system if they were put into a "call box" at a local PD, listed in priority behind the local residents of the city.

You mentioned Plano in a previous posting. If Plano PD were to take care of DART calls for service, the rider ship would most likely decrease. Not because of anything negative about the police department, but because they would be dispatched by priority, which would be low (based on our typical calls for service). Each department has nuisance calls or they have calls that are low in priority, just as we have. If you take the DART calls for service and add them to an already bogged down call list, you will end up with lots of angry patrons feeling that the PDs don’t care. And that would not be the truth. The local PDs care very much, but they have to take care of their priority calls. Look at a typical call sheet for a Dallas PD patrol officer. You will find that from the time they exit detail, they are jumping from call to call. You add DART calls in there and the call sheet will only get longer.

Understand that while you don’t see the need for DART having a separate PD, you need to ride along with some of us and see that the people we serve and help are extremely grateful that they are our priority. The local PDs are probably happy that we are there to take that burden from them. A typical call for service for one of our officers takes only minutes. Only in extreme cases will you ever hear one of our dispatchers tell you that we will not respond to something due to its priority. I have had numbers of people tell me that they were told by a local PD dispatcher that an investigator would contact them in a day or two on a residential or vehicle burglary. That is because they are bogged down with calls. Imagine throwing our call into that. It is just not feasible.

Now, this is not a "Rank" person speaking to you. I am just an average officer. I don’t speak on behalf of DART, but I do speak to educate people on what is real with the department. Trust me, whether you believe that DART is doing right with the management of the department or not, there is a need for the DART Police Department to have a separate police force. We may not have as many officers as we need, but we are giving you and the rest of the patrons everything that we have to keep them safe and secure.