Who wants to be Dallas Police Chief? The city is releasing the names of applicants; the first group includes a top Dallas County sheriff’s deputy, an assistant chief in the Houston Police Department and a longtime assistant director for the U.S. Marshals Service, reports the Dallas Morning News. The city is replacing Chief David Kunkle, who plans to retire in April. None of the applications released yesterday included top members of Kunkle’s command staff who are rumored to be considering the job.
Half of the new names are people whose experience either is not at a top level of their agencies or whose agencies are far smaller than the Dallas Police Department, a 3,600-officer organization that operates on a $415 million budget. The only local candidate for the job was Dallas Sheriff’s Department Chief Deputy Joe Costa, who commands all of that department’s operations outside the jail, such as patrol, criminal investigations and intelligence.