With all the problems facing the Dallas Police Department – rising crime rates, manpower shortage, a $1 million budget deficit – they don’t need the District Attorney’s office tying up officers in court.
But that’s exactly what’s going on at the County Courthouse. Assistant DAs are calling policemen to the courthouse and then letting them sit for hours when they should be out on the streets working on criminal cases.
The situation is this: Officers whose testimony is needed in criminal cases are summoned to the courtroom, ostensibly for pre-testimony conferences with the DAs trying the cases; it usually ends up with the DA off somewhere trying another case or at lunch while the officers cool their heels in small rooms off the courtroom.
Particular victims of this practice are detectives and plainclothes investigators who are assigned to the department’s criminal investigation division. Estimates by police supervisors place the manpower time loss at 20 per cent of the officers’ total time spent on the job. One section that is particularly hard-hit is the crimes against persons unit, which handles murder, rape, robbery and assault cases. “We are always tied up in court because they try so many of our cases,” one officer in the unit said.
Commanders blame the assistant DAs for being lazy about the situation. The police say that officers could be out in the field working instead of sitting around for hours waiting for a five-minute huddle with the DAs. Then, if they’re needed, they can be summoned to the courthouse by radio or electronic pocket pagers.
In addition to tying up on-duty officers, the DAs often summon policemen on their days off to sit around for hours collecting overtime. In the last 14 months the department has had to pay $42,022.95 in overtime to off-duty officers, who collect their extra pay by warming the seat of a chair. The figure may not seem too high, but it represents almost 90 per cent of the overtime paid to detectives. Police commanders would rather have them out on the streets working overtime on solving crime, or completing their work during regular working hours.
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