Former Dallas police chief hopes police and communities can bridge gaps

Renee Hall isn’t any stranger to unsolved homicides.

Hall was six months outdated when her father was killed within the line of obligation in Detroit. To at the present time, his homicide stays unsolved. 

“My goal is to make sure no one else has to live through that same level of trauma,” Hall instructed CBS News’ Jim Axelrod.

Despite the circumstances of her father’s dying, Hall pursued a profession in regulation enforcement. Years later, Hall turned a Detroit police officer on the age of 28. She went on to develop into chief of the Dallas Police Department, main a drive of greater than 3,600 sworn officers.

But the pandemic coupled with nationwide unrest following the 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis tore aside belief between Hall’s police drive and the communities in Dallas it served.

“If this is a broken relationship, how do I go into your home when a homicide has been committed and say that I’m committed to you to solve a crime when you don’t trust me as a police officer wearing the uniform?” Hall mentioned.

While Hall was police chief, murders spiked in Dallas, a development that was additionally evident throughout the nation. But in response to numbers from the Dallas Police Department, Hall’s detectives solved greater than 70% of homicides — 20 factors larger than the nationwide common.

“One of the first things my team and I did (was), we met with them and told them, ‘I don’t want to go to any community where we have great relationships. I only want to go to those communities where our relationships are challenged.’ I started there.”

The subsequent step for Hall: tackling variety in her personal rank and file.

“We went from 17%, 18% Latinos, Hispanics, in the police department under my leadership to about 24% because the largest portion of our community were Hispanic.”

Despite Hall’s efforts on the police division, homicides nonetheless occurred, and some had been unforgettable.

In 2020, a 1-year-old boy named Rory Norman was fatally shot whereas he slept inside his Dallas house throughout a surge in citywide homicides. 

“I’d gone to the hospital and saw his body, his very small body,” Hall mentioned. “It was infuriating.”

No arrest has been made within the case, a indisputable fact that Hall calls “disheartening.”

“There’s some brokenness in the amount of guns that are on our streets,” Hall mentioned. “There’s some brokenness in the relationships between police and the community. And so what are we going to do about it at this point? It takes work, and it takes owning where we are flawed and fixing it.”