7 defining moments from Chief Eddie García’s career with Dallas police

Police leaders say Chief Eddie García’s impact can’t be reduced to a single event in Dallas. In his more than three years here, he oversaw drops in arrests for lower-level offenses, reckoned with pyramid promotional schemes involving his officers and created a new constitutional policing unit.
As he prepares to leave for Austin, community members and officials have begun to look back on the changes, decisions and tests that proved pivotal after the chief arrived from San Jose, Calif.
Here are seven defining moments from García’s career in Dallas.
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One of his first major tests occurred shortly after his arrival to Dallas.
In his second month here, García fired Officer Bryan Riser, who was accused of ordering the slayings of two people. Riser was jailed by his department on capital murder charges in the 2017 deaths of Albert Douglas and Liza Saenz.
The allegations circulated nationwide. García called for an end to a war of words amid finger-pointing about where responsibility rested for the decision to keep Riser on the force after he’d been named a person of interest.
A month after Riser was arrested, a judge ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to keep him jailed. García vowed to continue investigating him, but Riser was not jailed again in connection with the crime. The detective investigating Riser admitted to errors in the arrest warrant and faced his own criminal probe, but a grand jury declined to bring charges.
Riser recently settled with the city. He also has filed a lawsuit against the detective.
In May 2021, García announced the plan that would become the bedrock of his Dallas career.
Created in collaboration with two University of San Antonio at Texas criminologists, the plan is based on the belief that small pockets of the city account for a disproportionate amount of its violence. It focuses on three strategies called hot-spot policing, place-network investigations and focused deterrence.
Since the plan was introduced, violent crime fell every year in Dallas. City and police officials credited the strategies with the annual drops.
So far in 2024, that trend has continued.
Four months into the job, García overturned Chief U. Reneé Hall’s disciplinary decisions against members of the vice unit who were accused of improperly handling evidence and misusing money.
Hall disciplined 22 members of the vice unit, which handles crimes related to prostitution and gambling. Following a three-year investigation, the department’s unit that investigates city employees for potential criminal misconduct determined there was insufficient evidence to support criminal charges.
Still, the officers were suspended without pay — which they later appealed.
Police association leaders publicly lauded García’s decision to reverse the discipline, which they saw as an early sign that the chief would be fair on accountability.
It had been nearly five decades since a Dallas police officer murdered 12-year-old Santos Rodriguez. In July 2021, his family heard the first apology by a Dallas police chief.
Officer Darrell Cain played Russian roulette with Santos’ life over the theft of $8 from a vending machine. Santos’ 13-year-old brother, David, was also yanked from bed for the interrogation. Cain shot Santos in the head after the boy repeated he was innocent.
Cain was convicted of murder with malice and sentenced to five years, but served only half of that. For years, Rodriguez’s mother said no one apologized to her and her family for that night.
“On behalf of the Dallas Police Department, as a father, I am sorry,” García told her in 2021. “We are sorry that someone trusted to protect you, someone who wore the same uniform I proudly wear today took your son and took David’s brother away by way of murder.”
Rodriguez’s death had galvanized the Mexican American community to seek change. The chief’s apology was a testament to his ability to bridge the gap with Hispanic communities — a hope officials had voiced when he took the helm as the first Latino to lead the Dallas Police Department.
City Council members approved most of García’s requests during his time at the helm of the police department — even when they were related to controversial topics.
In January 2022, the council unanimously approved the department’s proposal to make strip clubs and other sexually oriented businesses close between 2 and 6 a.m. The move prompted an outcry from some community members, workers and businesses. García and police officials argued it would help make the community safer.
The political win appeared to illustrate the chief’s persistent influence in City Hall. He also successfully advocated for more money for the police budget.
García was vocal about efforts to better officer wellness, stating in his second year in Dallas that a new unit he approved to improve mental health aims to de-stigmatize “suck-it-up” mentalities in law enforcement.
The wellness initiative consists of phone call “check ins” with officers after they’re involved in serious incidents, a monthly newsletter highlighting mental-health resources, surveys, training and the full-time unit. It quickly went to work, helping officers through two officer suicides and other unexpected deaths.
The idea spurred heaps of praise and has been replicated elsewhere, catching the eyes of law enforcement leaders in other agencies nationwide, police officials have said.
Dallas police are still in mourning after the brazen attack Aug. 29 on Officer Darron Burks, a former math teacher who was shot as he sat in his squad car in southeast Oak Cliff, the chief has said. Two other officers responded to check on Burks and were wounded in gunfire from the same assailant.
The gunman was chased to Lewisville, where he was fatally shot by at least six Dallas officers.
García was out of town when the attack occurred, but quickly came back to Dallas and held an emotional news conference the following day, where he called the shooting a “premeditated execution.”
The chief spent time with Burks’ mother in the days after her son’s death and shared an impassioned tribute for the patrol officer at a packed funeral service.