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What is Dallas' new police chief not telling us about vice officers?

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Dallas Morning News Editorial

It's a reasonable assumption that something significant has gone wrong within the vice unit of the Dallas Police Department.

New Police Chief U. Renee Hall, citing "serious issues," last Thursday abruptly shut down the entire operation responsible for gambling and prostitution investigations. She reassigned all 20 vice officers to other work and switched out the assistant chief whose duties previously had included overseeing that division.

A wholesale dismantling like this one — reaching all the way to the assistant chief level — is a big deal. So what's going on? How big is it? Did someone break the law?

Can't say.

Can't say.

Can't say.

In her initial major move as chief, Hall decided the time was right to provide the first couple of sentences of a serious narrative — but she chose not to include enough facts to allow the public to make sense of it.

We're willing to guardedly give Hall the benefit of the doubt on why she is proceeding in this way — for now. As she points out, a thorough investigation needs to be done. And undoubtedly, she knows more about what's going on inside vice than we do.

But therein is the problem.

By, in effect, revealing two corners of the painting without revealing the middle, Hall is allowing outsiders to see nothing. In place of facts, the public and their representatives at City Hall are left only with unease and uncertainty.

So why make the announcement at all?

Bad-news headlines about police department vice units always set off warning bells. Whether in Dallas or any other big-city operation, lax accountability and fuzzy guidelines too often are the norm. Undercover investigations require that money goes out the door; rogue officers are not a rarity.

Separately, with the Dallas vice unit temporarily disbanded, exactly how will gambling and prostitution investigations go forward effectively? Hall says patrol officers will be assigned to new cases, but exactly how will that work?

Hall, who is conducting a top-to-bottom review of the department she has led since September, has made clear that more changes are coming.

Maybe her internal vice bust is some kind of message to officers that she won't be taking anything lightly. Perhaps to a new chief, the unit's internal policies — or lack thereof — didn't make sense.

Whatever the motivation, it might have made more sense for Hall to wait to take this action — or publicize it — until she could provide a fuller accounting of what's behind it. Taxpayers deserve information, but so do they deserve the facts when they are in a usable form.

Now that Hall has revealed part of the picture, it's critical to get the rest of the story out there as soon as possible.

She's doing something. But exactly what? And why?

What's your view?
