By Rebecca Lopez and Jason Trahan, WFAA-TV, The Texas Tribune.

The year before President Donald Trump announced he was sending National Guard troops and federal agents into major cities like Washington, D.C., and Chicago, declaring crime out of control, a Dallas nonprofit made a similar case for putting more police on the streets.

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” Trump said at an Aug. 11 press conference, announcing the unprecedented federal takeover of the Washington police force and the deployment of the National Guard to the city.

A year earlier, a man named Pete Marocco told Dallas City Council members that Dallas was descending into comparable anarchy.

“We cannot wait until Dallas looks like other degenerate cities that have made irreversible mistakes, devaluing their police force and destroying their city center,” said Marocco, who would go on to briefly lead the U.S. Agency for International Development under Trump.

At that time, Marocco was speaking as the executive director of a nonprofit called Dallas HERO, whose leaders wanted voters to pass propositions that would radically overhaul the city’s charter. One of them, a ballot measure known as Proposition U, would force Dallas to grow its police force to 4,000 officers, and significantly raise their starting pay, in order to address the kind of lawlessness Marocco claimed the city was experiencing.

Voters went on to narrowly pass the proposition in the same November election that put Trump back in the Oval Office. They also approved another “citizen enforcement” measure Dallas HERO got onto the ballot, Proposition S, which gave residents the right to more easily sue the city to block policies and have them declared unlawful by stripping Dallas of its immunity from litigation. The measure makes Dallas the first city in the country to lose its governmental immunity, legal experts said.

Few people in Dallas dispute that more police are needed; 911 call response times have increased in recent years, and growing the department’s size has been a goal of mayors, City Council members and police chiefs for decades. But violent crime here, as elsewhere nationally, is trending downward despite the growing claims by Trump and other leaders that certain cities are incapable of governing or policing themselves.

“We’re seeing the national government going into Washington and making noises about going into other cities — we’re talking about blue cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Oakland, maybe New York,” said Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who studies outside influences on city governments.

But what happened in Dallas last fall, he said, follows a different pattern from these federal or state government takeovers.

“It’s coming up from within the city,” he said. “The state isn’t imposing this; local voters have.”

Now, almost a year after voters approved these measures in Dallas, WFAA set out to understand how the Dallas HERO measures came to pass, look into the often misleading statements about violent crime that the group made to voters and explore the long-term effects of these changes.

Already, the city is feeling the effects of the two Dallas HERO-backed propositions voters passed on that November ballot.

In June, the Dallas City Council voted to change its police-hiring standards, eliminating its college credit requirement in an effort to hire more officers. Critics say lowering standards to boost hiring can lead to less-qualified officers patrolling the streets.

In September, the City Council approved a new budget for next fiscal year . It includes cuts to popular libraries and city pools and eliminates some city jobs, but adds money for 350 new police officers — still far short of the nearly 800 needed to reach the 4,000-officer minimum mandated by Proposition U, which had no timeline for compliance.

And earlier this year, a Dallas couple became the first known litigants against the city to cite Proposition S, the measure that eliminated the city’s governmental immunity, in a lawsuit over construction of a church game court. The couple initiated the lawsuit before Proposition S was passed but filed motions citing the city’s lack of immunity in March. The city of Dallas said in court that the proposition is unconstitutional but declined to comment about the lawsuit. The lawsuit, which is still pending, has not been previously reported.

All of this has locals, including local law enforcement, concerned.

One of the most vocal critics of the HERO initiative is Frederick Frazier, a Trump-endorsed former state lawmaker who spent nearly 30 years as a Dallas police officer . He asked a question many others have had in the course of WFAA’s reporting: Are Dallas HERO’s local efforts a precursor to similar changes in other cities?

“Are you trying to build a better department? Or are you trying to destroy a city?” Frazier said. “I want to know: Are we the experiment?”

Dallas Violent Crime Down

This summer, Dallas-area hotelier and GOP megadonor Monty Bennett joined a conversation on X Spaces to discuss Dallas HERO’s efforts.

“Every American city in this country of any size is a disaster,” Bennett said in that recorded audio discussion, “and it’s terrible.”

Last year, Bennett confirmed to WFAA that he helped fund the group , formed in 2023. But because it is a nonprofit organization, it’s not required to disclose its donor lists, so it’s unclear how much of its $3 million in donations in 2023 and 2024 came from him. Bennett declined to answer WFAA’s questions about how much he contributed to the group, but his office did provide a copy of the organization’s 2024 990 tax form.

Both before the November election and after, Bennett — who has contributed money to Trump’s presidential campaign and to local conservative political action committees advocating for school vouchers — pushed HERO’s message that Dallas, in particular downtown Dallas, is a dangerous place, frequently via his conservative online news site The Dallas Express .

Bennett lives in Highland Park, an affluent community that’s surrounded by Dallas but boasts its own city government and police force. But the headquarters of his hotel company, Ashford Inc., is within the city limits, on Dallas’ north side, which historically has much lower crime than other parts of the city.

His messaging fits an idea that conservatives have increasingly pushed. Trump, in announcing his 2024 campaign for president, referred to the “blood-soaked streets of our once great cities,” calling them “cesspools of violent crimes.”

A group called Save Austin Now tried unsuccessfully in 2021 to convince voters in that city to pass an ordinance forcing it to hire hundreds more police officers.

Bennett later met with Matt Mackowiak, a longtime Austin-based Republican strategist who co-founded Save Austin Now. Mackowiak said he spoke to Bennett about Dallas HERO’s messaging and how to collect enough signatures to get its propositions on the November 2024 ballot.

A spokesperson for Bennett told WFAA that Dallas HERO’s efforts were not modeled after Save Austin Now and that Bennett is not affiliated with the Austin group.

According to city police statistics during the 2021 Austin campaign, violent crime rates in that city were up by 5% compared with 2020, although property crime overall was down in 2021 compared with 2020.

In Dallas, however, violent crime is on track to go down for a fifth year in a row . Last year, Dallas had one of its lowest homicide rates in decades , 14 per 100,000 residents, down from 2023’s rate of 19 per 100,000.

Jay Coons, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Sam Houston State University, said Dallas voters in November responded strongly to perceptions about crime — regardless of whether it’s actually declining or on the rise.

“Let’s face it: Fear sells,” Coons said. “If you want people to do something, if you can instill fear, that’s a very powerful motivator.”

But that fear isn’t justified in Dallas, said former interim police Chief Mike Igo.

“To the point of crime is out of control?” Igo said. “It’s not.”

Igo and Frazier are among the unusual collection of voices who opposed the Dallas HERO propositions. The Dallas Police Association, which represents thousands of officers, spoke out against the measures , calling them “ contrived by a small group of people who do not live in Dallas, with no open dialogue .” The association’s leaders argued the propositions would affect its ability to negotiate pay raises for all of its officers and had questions about the department’s ability to train so many new officers while retaining current ones. Former police chiefs, all 14 of Dallas’ City Council members at the time, nearly all of the city’s prominent civic and business groups, and at least four former Dallas mayors publicly opposed the measures as well.

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, who switched from the Democratic to the Republican party in 2023, lauded HERO’s efforts but still urged voters to reject the propositions.

“Their policy language is deeply flawed, and they would create more problems for the city than they would solve,” Johnson and Cara Mendelsohn, one of the more conservative Dallas City Council members, wrote in an October 2024 op-ed in The Dallas Morning News.

Bennett, who declined an interview request for this story but answered a few questions via email, said he was disappointed in their positions on the measures.

Opponents to the propositions Dallas HERO pushed warned that shackling the city’s budget to such a huge public safety commitment, while at the same time making Dallas vulnerable to lawsuits, could mean cuts to other critical services.

Bennett, in his recent X Spaces conversation, said hiring hundreds of police is simple, though experts have told WFAA it is not.

He also argued that building a new Dallas police academy, which has been in the planning stages for years , is not necessary. He suggested the department instead raise its pay rates in order to hire back officers it had trained but lost to other departments.

Hiring back officers who’ve left for other departments, or recruiting from other departments in general (a practice called lateral hiring that’s regularly employed among police recruiters in Fort Worth , Dallas and other cities across Texas), can indeed be an effective hiring tool, said a police official who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak for the department. But those hires account for only a fraction of the new officers brought on every year. And, after serving in smaller departments, some officers may learn they prefer the slower pace afforded by those jobs, the official said.

Bennett said in an email that the city could hire more officers if it raised their salaries. “The solution to hiring more police officers is to pay them better,” Bennett wrote. “It’s no more complicated than that. Pay them what they’re worth." He didn’t explain how he thought the city would budget for those increases.

Hiring more police officers has been a goal of the Dallas Police Department for more than two decades, Frazier said. But, he argued, the city doesn’t have enough field trainers, cars or physical spaces to accommodate so many new officers joining its ranks in such a short period of time.

“I would say that would be very difficult,” Frazier said. “I’ve heard a lot of folks say that — ‘We could fix you in a minute.’ No one’s done it.”

The new city budget, which took effect Oct. 1, increased the police department’s minimum starting pay, raising it from about $75,000 to more than $81,000 annually. But that still falls thousands of dollars short of several smaller suburban departments in the area.

According to city reports, DPD had 3,215 officers as of June. The city manager’s goal is to gradually increase that number — but at the current rate, she said, the department won’t reach HERO’s 4,000-officer demand until around 2029.

“It’s a balancing act,” City Manager Kim Tolbert told WFAA during a recent extended sitdown when asked about the impact of the HERO amendments on the budget. “We’re listening, we’re being responsive, but we’re also being good stewards of the public dollar.”

In an email, Bennett wrote, “Government will always blame imposed outside requirements when it has to curb its profligate spending.”

Who Leads Dallas HERO?

WFAA has tried to better understand not just why Dallas HERO’s efforts were successful in the city, but also the motivations of the people behind the initiative. The group bills itself as bipartisan, but at least some of its current and former leaders and associates, like Bennett and Marocco, have championed conservative interests.

HERO’s founding president, Stefani Carter, is a Republican former state representative who is now the lead director on the board of Braemar Hotels & Resorts, a real estate investment trust focused on investing in luxury hotels and resorts. Bennett is Braemar’s founder and chair of its board. ( Braemar is for sale , and Carter’s fate on its board is unclear; she did not respond to questions about her status or about the Dallas HERO initiative.)

HERO’s attorney, Art Martinez de Vara, is a municipal lawyer, a historian and the mayor of a small town near San Antonio called Von Ormy, which he helped to incorporate almost 20 years ago as a so-called “liberty city,” operating with minimal levels of government oversight but facing myriad issues including lack of a sewer system. He declined to speak to WFAA about the propositions, citing anticipated litigation.

During the fall campaign to pass the propositions, Marocco led Dallas HERO as its executive director while living in University Park, a self-governed suburban enclave nestled inside Dallas similar to where Bennett calls home. Dallas HERO told WFAA Marocco is no longer with the organization. Trump later tapped Marocco to run USAID, where he wrote the cable ordering a freeze on all U.S. foreign and humanitarian aid, resulting in furloughs and layoffs across the agency.

Marocco did not respond to the news organization’s efforts to reach him.

The man who replaced Marocco in early February as HERO’s executive director, Damien LeVeck, is a horror film director whose social media account Dallas En Fuego trolls city officials with what he refers to as “spicy videos & memes.” He also sells branded merchandise, including a T-shirt with a picture of a Dallas City Council member he often criticizes.

“Show your support for combatting Dallas municipal tyranny (and stupidity) with our great merchandise,” the language on his merch site reads.

All refused to speak with WFAA on camera.

LeVeck provided a statement, on behalf of HERO, that read, in part: “The HERO amendments … decisively passed by voters last November, will boost public safety by expanding the police force and strengthening government accountability. Residents deserve to feel safe where they live and work, and we are committed to ensuring city leadership upholds the will of the voters."

Coons, who spent nearly four decades with the Harris County sheriff’s office as a patrol commander before entering academia, said even in a city like Dallas with declining violent crime, people can still be scared into making political decisions.

“Whether crime is rampant and people are being murdered in the streets, or whether it’s an extraordinarily safe place to be, the truth probably is going to be a little bit separate than the individual Dallasite’s perception of what’s going on,” he said.

Voters in the city’s more affluent northern side narrowly voted against the measure, with 49.3% voting in favor, an analysis by ProPublica and WFAA found. But in the south, where crime rates are higher and police response times are longer, 52.9% of voters cast ballots in favor.

Dallas City Council member Carolyn King Arnold, who represents part of southern Dallas and was an outspoken opponent of the HERO amendments, said the organization’s backers exploited her constituents’ frustrations over crime in order to get their measures passed.

“In talking to some who actually voted in the southern sector for this, they told me basically, ‘I just want to see one officer ride through, that’s why I voted for it,’ not understanding the full impact of that amendment,” Arnold said. “It's always about fear.”

It’s not clear what’s next for the Dallas HERO team.

Since its win in November, the group has taken to social media and spoken at City Council meetings to demand more money be devoted to the police department.

“Crime, homelessness, and property destruction is rampant throughout Dallas,” HERO posted on X on Aug. 19 .

Within hours of the City Council passing the coming year’s budget, HERO publicly took issue with it. According to a Sept. 18 statement , the organization said the budget “fails to comply with Proposition U.”

Asked about the city’s argument that the budget meets the proposition requirements, Bennett wrote in an email, “With respect, it just doesn’t seem like this is true.”

LeVeck swore in the organization’s Sept. 18 statement that Dallas HERO will “hold city leaders accountable.”

“Sue them into submission!” one X user wrote in response to that promise .

The organization has already threatened to do so.

In December, HERO, citing Proposition S, the immunity measure, argued that the city isn’t enforcing state laws banning people from sleeping in encampments on public property . In March, the group’s attorney sent a letter to the city threatening to sue it for not hiring police fast enough . The city declined to comment about both incidents.

Frazier said he and other local law enforcement stakeholders remain concerned about Dallas HERO’s efforts. While their actions are abundant, their ultimate goals are murky.

“When you ask that question around,” Frazier said, “no one really knows what the end game is.”

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