A little over a month into the job, Dallas’ new police chief leads a department at a pivotal juncture. To avoid a metaphorical iceberg, he said, he needs to steer the ship gradually.
“I just want to take it slow,” Comeaux told The Dallas Morning News. “Then, all of a sudden, a year later, everyone’s gonna say, ‘Holy crap, look at all the positive change.’”
Comeaux, 56, faces a torrent of challenges as he settles into his downtown office. While past chiefs, including his predecessor Eddie García, brought quick adjustments after taking the helm, Dallas’ new chief has stayed comparatively quiet. In Comeaux’s words, that’s part of the plan.
The chief gave himself 90 days to learn before making changes. Still, since his start April 23, he’s had to contend with recruitment demands, tension over immigration enforcement, a pension shortfall, fluctuating police academy plans and daily concerns about crime and response times.
As he navigates myriad and disparate forces, residents, researchers and police officials told The News, the chief’s key to success is to listen first. Dallas is a tricky city, they said. People want reduced crime and fair policing, with accountability starting at Comeaux’s level.
That message has to trickle down from Comeaux to beat cops, said Antong Lucky, a resident in Mill City, southeast of Fair Park, who serves as president of Urban Specialists, a violence interrupter nonprofit.
In the backdrop of it all is a voter-approved directive to hire around 900 more officers, which is already under threat of a lawsuit by the group that authored the idea. As Comeaux looks to accomplish that, he’ll need to balance community trust amid a national immigration crackdown.
“He has a major opportunity,” Lucky said, “and I’m praying that he takes the opportunity to bridge gaps, to build morale in the department, bring on new officers — but bring them on in a way where they are educated and informed in terms of community policing and how you bridge those gaps and build those relationships.”
Some of the problems in Comeaux’s lap could be seen as unfamiliar territory for the former federal Drug Enforcement Administration leader from Houston, who hasn’t been a local cop since 1996. He is aware of the tasks ahead.
“I’m not afraid of a challenge,” Comeaux said during an hourlong interview at a coffee shop near Dallas police headquarters. “I’m telling you right now, Dallas is gonna have to deal with me because I’m not going anywhere.”
Early Adversity, Later Success
Comeaux, a law enforcement officer for 33 years, is a devout Catholic with two kids in their 20s and a wife of two years. He likes to golf, walk, fish and bike. He’s already begun to bike in Dallas, he said, and was shocked when people yelled out of car windows, “Hey, Chief!” and “Chief, welcome to Dallas!” He’s looking to buy a house and sees himself as chief for 10 years.
Comeaux was born in Lafayette, Louisiana, and raised in New Orleans. His earliest years were marked by adversity. He said his biological father was abusive to his mother, who raised him on $80 a week and still apologizes for it. His clothes were purchased too big, Comeaux said, so he could wear them until they were too small.
A turning point came when his mother remarried to a man Comeaux considers his father. Without him, Comeaux said, “I’m dead or in jail.” At 8 years old, Comeaux wanted to play the saxophone, but it cost $50 a week. Instead, his father put Comeaux in baseball. It was not only cost-effective, but intentional.
“He always said, ‘You being in baseball will help you in your life because you’re going to get to diversify and see what others do,’” Comeaux recalled. “The neighborhoods I grew up in was all Black. When you play baseball, you’re playing more with other races, other coaches.”
That decision paved a path for Comeaux, who left New Orleans at 18 to play baseball at a junior college in St. Louis. Two years later, he transferred to Texas State University. After an injury, a friend’s parent, a sergeant with the Houston Police Department, asked him what he wanted to do. “I’m going to be a police officer like you,” Comeaux responded.
The comment was meant in jest, but within days, the man brought him an application. Comeaux realized it could be a sign. He thought it’d be a two-year wait. He got the job in three months.
At the age of 21, he left school early and joined the Houston Police Department.
After about five years, he found himself talking to a DEA agent. The agent had a six-figure salary, an enticing boost from the $55,000 Comeaux made as a Houston cop. He enrolled in the University of Houston, earned his degree and put it on the recruiter’s desk.
Once at the DEA, he steadily climbed the ranks. In 2006, he said, a subpar supervisor spurred him to realize he was complaining instead of being part of the solution. He became a manager, and from there, continued to think: “What’s next?”
His career took him to Oakland, California; Tucson, Arizona; Gulfport, Mississippi; Washington, D.C.; Jackson, Mississippi; Los Angeles, San Francisco and back to Houston. When he got to Jackson around 2017, he thought: “Man, it’d be cool to retire as a police chief.”
He remembered a day in 1992 in Houston’s Third Ward after he made arrests at a street corner as a fresh-faced cop. Nearby, an elderly woman on a porch waved. She said thank you. She enjoys sitting on her porch, she told him, and all she’d wanted to do was sit and not get shot.
“So many of my friends think I’m absolutely crazy,” Comeaux said. “So many of ‘em tried to talk me out of it, but I really feel like I’m built for this. I feel like I can make a bigger impact day-to-day being a chief of police rather than being a special agent in charge.
“Decisions I make can impact a million people a day. And to me, that motivates me.”
90 Days to Learn
The new chief describes his management style in three words: inspiring, motivating and empowering. He wants to propel his command staff to come up with ideas to move the Dallas Police Department forward. In his view, that starts slowly.
Comeaux thinks everyone has shown their best selves because he’s new. Within time, he’ll gradually build his own team and bring change. If he came in and implemented 20 initiatives at once, he said, only a few would stick.
Jaime Castro, president of the Dallas Police Association, said Comeaux has his association’s support. It’s difficult for anyone to be a police chief in today’s world, he said, adding there’s always a learning curve and Comeaux’s background is mainly with the federal government.
“It is so important for Chief Comeaux to succeed during these challenging times in our department,” Castro said. “Officers are patiently waiting to see how he develops his policies in order to continue moving the department in the right direction.”
Jennifer Atherton, president of the Dallas Police Women’s Association, said Comeaux faced skepticism coming from outside of Dallas, but an upside is he doesn’t have ties to the “good ol’ boys club.” He’s signaled he wants to continue monthly meetings with the police associations, a group gathering that Atherton credits for squashing internal bickering during García’s tenure.
Comeaux should spend time looking into police employees’ backgrounds before promoting people based on the words of a few, she said. “What Comeaux could do differently than some others I’ve seen,” she said, “is ask, listen, find out more about them.”
Comeaux’s sights are already on a few police units. He wants to clean up the internal affairs division, a group of officers who investigate their colleagues for policy infractions. An internal report earlier this year found it’s been bogged down by major backlogs and conflicting policies.
He also wants to be the first big city whose first responders use drones “all the time.” He’s taken an interest in adding more staff to the fugitive unit, which tracks down people with outstanding warrants, and said he’ll look at the narcotics and gang units next.
His unequivocal focus has been recruiting. The department is studying comparable cities to make sure Dallas is competitive. He wants to study the makeup of current Dallas officers. If people were former athletes, they’ll recruit at athletic events. If officers came from fraternities and sororities, recruiters will approach those groups instead of passing out flyers in a hallway.
“I’m always trying to figure out: ‘What can we do different?’” Comeaux said. “I don’t want to come up behind; I want to figure out what’s at the tip of the spear. And that’s what I’m trying to get DPD to now.”
Time for a Reset
A 2024 Dallas survey showed the public safety topics that residents felt were most important were police response times and visibility of police. Police services ranked second as the service residents believed should be the city’s top priority, following only infrastructure maintenance.
The results signaled growing dissatisfaction with police. Overall, 62 percent of respondents rated police services as poor or fair; 27 percent rated as good and only 11 percent chose excellent.
John Fullinwider, a longtime Dallas activist and co-founder of Mothers Against Police Brutality, said Comeaux has to contend with the side of the public that wants more cops and faster response times, as well as the side that has experienced harm by police and is more concerned about how a community is policed.
The effort has to go beyond Comeaux to make people feel secure, he said, noting the City Council should also vocalize support for immigrants and families in high-crime neighborhoods.
“Good policing is built on trust,” Fullinwider said. “Somebody has to take a risk to tell you who robbed that store. What he could do is maybe embrace police oversight, encourage people to come forward and talk about their experiences with the police.”
Alex Piquero, a criminology professor at the University of Miami and former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, said surveys should be taken with hesitation because they’re “like Yelp reviews.” Piquero used to work at the University of Texas at Dallas and served on the mayor’s task force on safe communities after violent crime surged here in 2019.
Comeaux, like any big city chief, he said, needs to prioritize violence reduction. Violent crime has fallen for four consecutive years in Dallas and was at pre-pandemic levels in 2024.
“He’s gotta see what the issues are and not just sit back and say, ‘Oh, great, we’ve gone down to pre-pandemic levels,’” Piquero said. “There’s still hundreds of murders, and those are peoples’ lives. Those are people whose families will be forever destroyed as a result of that.”
Also paramount for Comeaux, Piquero said, is he needs to be visible and available. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer and other police killings put a negative light on officers in 2020, and it takes “a long time” for people to let that anger go, he said. If crime continues to drop as Comeaux comes in with a blank slate, community perceptions could shift.
“Organizations are slow to change,” Piquero said. “It’s a reset time for people, and people have to give him the ability to reset.”
What the Community Needs
Comeaux wants to bring consistency to Dallas police discipline and said he’s told his command staff that police brass have to be out in the public and in communities.
That’s the approach that Lucky, the Urban Specialists leader, hoped Comeaux will embrace. A former gang member, Lucky was known to have a close relationship with García, Dallas’ former police chief. García’s team sought him out, Lucky said, and they were guided by a “north star” of accountability — both for officers who do wrong and for people who commit crimes.
Police officials need to seek out the voices of people in crime-ridden neighborhoods who don’t always trust law enforcement, Lucky said. “People want a chief that they can say, ‘That’s my chief,’” he said. “‘He represents my values. He’s aligned with what I see from my neighborhood.’”
Mass protests spurred by an erosion of trust between police and the community, he added, are “one incident away from being prevalent today.”
The new chief has already faced scrutiny on the topic of immigration. He has said his officers will assist federal immigration authorities if asked. When police oversight board members tried to ask him for details Tuesday night, an assistant city attorney cut in, saying Comeaux could only answer questions about his background because the agenda said it’d be an introduction.
John Mark Davidson, chairman of the oversight board, told The News that people in the city want to feel seen and respected. He wants to see emphasis and intentionality placed on training, he said, adding police conduct and their treatment of people matters.
Comeaux needs to host listening sessions, visit communities, educate and enforce the truth that police are not threats, but protectors, Davidson said. That education couldn’t be more important as local officials maneuver demands from the federal government.
“Dallas is a global city that is diverse and vibrant, and there are so many immigrant families who are here living who I’m afraid are having to live in fear,” Davidson said. “It’s a critical time for Dallas. Public safety of course is a top priority, but so is public trust. ”
Comeaux said conversations with community members and stakeholders made one point clear.
“What I understand is that Dallas wants to be policed,” Comeaux said. “They just wanna be policed fairly, and they want transparency.
“I will bring that to the table.”
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