Dallas’ goal is to make Garcia its highest-paid police chief

Eddie Garcia’s offer letter signed in May to remain Dallas police chief includes a provision guaranteeing he will remain the highest-paid top cop in Texas.

“The city is obligated to pay you a base salary of $306,440.40, or the highest salary for a police chief in a Texas city with a population of over one million people,” Interim City Manager Kimberly Tolbert wrote in the letter.

“If a police chief in a Texas city with a population of more than one million people receives a salary higher than your base salary, your salary will be increased to the higher salary, which will take effect from the first uniform pay period 30 days after the effective date of that police chief’s salary.”

The only other cities in Texas with a population exceeding 1 million are Houston (2.3 million) and San Antonio (1.5 million). Former Houston Police Chief Troy Finner’s salary when he retired in May was about $298,000, the Houston Chronicle reported. DXRequests for pay from Acting Chief Larry Satterwhite and San Antonio Police Chief William McManus received no response at press time.

DX On May 16, he reported that Tolbert had announced that Garcia had agreed to remain as police chief until at least 2027.

“It was complicated, but we managed to do it,” she said in a statement. “If this was NFL football, we would have kept Chief Garcia on the Dallas team; he is the right quarterback to lead our police force. We certainly didn’t want to lose him to free agency.”

Garcia signed an “addendum” to the offer letter he received from the city of Dallas in December 2020. This keeps his annual salary at $306,440.40. However, in November, he will begin receiving a $10,000 retention bonus every six months until May 2027.

“I’m honored that the city recognizes the work we’ve done together,” Garcia told The Dallas Morning News. “I am extremely grateful that City Manager Tolbert included this provision in the contract.”

Since his appointment in 2021, Garcia has implemented a plan to reduce violent crime, oversaw the development of a crime analytics panel, worked with state lawmakers to criminalize the removal of ankle monitors, tried to repair police-resident relations and worked to shorten police response time.

Meanwhile, it struggled with a much smaller budget than other high-crime cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York: Dallas leaders allocated just $654 million to police this fiscal year.