Shortly after Eddie García was named Dallas’ first Latino police chief, Juanita Arévalo contacted his office.
Arévalo, the leader of Pleasant Grove Unidos, a community group that works closely with city departments to improve the neighborhood, invited García to a community meeting. She hoped it would be an opportunity for residents to voice concerns and get to know the new chief.
She wasn’t especially optimistic García would attend. After all, previous chiefs often declined such invitations.
García did more than show up.
“He spoke extensively with the community and listened to their concerns. He was honest about why the police took so long to attend the 911 calls, and people felt that García was someone they could trust,” said Arévalo, 67. “The community did not feel afraid or intimidated by him.”
In that moment, it became clear to Arévalo and so many others what it meant to finally have a police chief who looked like them, spoke like them, was one of them.
On Nov. 1, García ends his three-year stint as the first Latino and Spanish speaker to lead the Dallas Police Department to take on a new role as assistant city manager in Austin.
He leaves a legacy of not only falling crime rates, but of building a bond with a community that has reasons to fear and mistrust law enforcement — that has felt overpoliced and, despite being 42% of Dallas’ population, overlooked.
“It was an honor to have become the first Latino chief in Dallas,” García told The Dallas Morning News Friday. “There is nothing you cannot accomplish. I may have been the first, but I definitely will not be the last.”
The question for many in the Latino community is whether the next police chief — and DPD more broadly — can build on the foundation of trust built by García.
For Arévalo, García’s strengths were his ability to connect with the community, his willingness to be available and his understanding of the culture. It also was the way he communicated. She remembers one thing, in particular, he told residents in Spanish at her community meeting:
“No tenga miedo de reportar los crimenes.” “Do not be afraid to report crimes.”
The community group Comadres Unidas de Dallas Y Más, which focuses on connecting the Hispanic community with city resources, adopted García’s message almost as its slogan and repeats it in every meeting and on social media.
The group has worked extensively with DPD Unidos, the police department’s Latino community outreach program, to build trust with the Hispanic and Spanish-speaking communities in Dallas.
Myrna Méndez, who founded Comadres Unidas, praised García for how he prioritized providing a seat at the table for the Latino community to express concerns and solutions.
For Méndez, García’s leadership and ability to truly understand the Hispanic community was highlighted last year when Texas Senate Bill 4, a proposal to provide local law enforcement with broad powers to arrest people they suspect of being in the country illegally, was introduced.
“García said on many occasions the Dallas Police were here to protect us, our community,” Méndez said. “He understood the fears Latino residents had if they would be stopped by the cops over their documentation status.”
During a meeting in June, García told council members that officers are bound by the law but a policy was being developed to ensure residents’ civil rights wouldn’t be violated. SB 4 is on hold pending a court challenge.
García has not often spoken publicly about what it has meant to be the first Latino to lead the nation’s ninth-largest police department. He more often shares his personal history as a way to connect.
García, 53, grew up in Puerto Rico and was raised Catholic. He came to San Jose, Calif., without knowing English and was raised by a single mom. It was a story he often recalled and was proud of, and one that resonated.
“You can speak the language, but if you don’t understand the culture and the cultural dynamics of the Latino community, it is going to be really hard to connect with them,” said Socorro Perales, 62, a community leader with the Catholic Diocese of Dallas.
Perales recalls a block walk organized by the St. Pius X Church and Dallas Area Interfaith with García in November 2023 as a moment when she saw how he had the charisma to connect with Latino residents and share his Catholic faith.
“Many residents were surprised to see the police chief was someone who looked and spoke like them,” Perales said. “He was cracking jokes, asking about their concerns and sharing with them how, since he was a little boy, he used to go to Mass with his family every Sunday.”
These types of interactions created momentum in the Latino community and within the Dallas Police Department.
“I believe it impacted the diversity of the department very positively,” García said, “not just in recruiting, but for promotional opportunities within the department.”
Albert Martinez, who became the Dallas Independent School District’s police chief in February after a long tenure with DPD, said Garcia’s leadership led to greater participation and involvement of the Latino community in events and as the department’s eyes in the streets. The city could not immediately provide data on the demographic makeup of the department over the course of García’s time as chief, but Martinez said the department recruited more Hispanic officers.
“We’ve been growing the Latino numbers in the police department for many years. Chief García also benefited from that direction. But we saw a greater interest by the overall population to become Dallas police officers because they saw the professionalism and the integrity of the police department,” said Martinez, 54, who served as an executive assistant chief under García.
“It helped with Chief García being at the front line, the way he spoke, his leadership, the violent crime plan, a very strong focus on that level of service, I think, really that inspired others to comply with police and not just Latinos.”
Susana García, a community leader in the Bachman Lake area, was among those inspired by García.
In 2021, she enrolled in the police citizen’s academy and completed the 10-week course, along with friends and neighbors who felt their community finally had a voice with García as leader.
“The feeling of having someone like us in charge was special,” said Susana García, “I was so excited to graduate and have him [Chief García] give me my diploma.”
Still, the reality is tension and skepticism is almost inevitable between law enforcement and communities of color — and one Latino police chief doesn’t erase that.
Eva Arreguin is the founder of the podcast De Colores and a community activist who campaigned for defunding the police in 2020. Having a Latino at the top of the police force, she said, hasn’t changed her feelings about police and police brutality.
“A lot of people probably felt a bigger connection to this chief, because he was Latino. I personally didn’t feel that connection to him,” said Arreguin, 30. “I saw it as, ‘Oh, you’re just getting one of us to hurt us now,’ and I don’t know if that feels better to me personally, but it is a very complicated situation, especially in a city where police brutality is prominent.”
Jerry Hawkins, executive director of Dallas Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation, echoed Arregui’s statement that the police department as an institution needs to work more with everyone in the community to build trust.
Hawkins said García has had a tough job, but he has shown leadership in removing officers who are not living up to their oaths and committing violations or crimes.
”He didn’t make any racist remarks that I can remember. I think he actually kept a low profile, which is really important for a police chief,” said Hawkins. “He didn’t inflame tensions with the community, but building trust is a whole other thing that would take way more than any of these folks [police chiefs and officers] could ever do.”
When García took over, he inherited a department with a decades-long backstory punctuated by events that shaped its relationship with the Latino community.
Perhaps none was more resonant than the 1973 murder of 12-year-old Santos Rodriguez.
Santos and his 13-year-old brother, David, were yanked from their beds for an interrogation in which Darrell Cain, a Dallas police officer, played Russian roulette with Santos’ life.
The alleged crime? The theft of $8 from a vending machine at a Fina gas station in what’s now Dallas’ Uptown neighborhood.
Cain tugged on the trigger once. Then he pulled a second time. A bullet shot into the left side of Santos’ skull, just after the boy had once more pleaded his innocence.
The murder stunned Dallas and the nation, as one horrific detail after another emerged.
While other police officials over the decades might have seen the murder as history — and not about them — García acknowledged it, he owned it. In a gesture that helped define the importance of García to the Latino community, in 2021 he formally apologized to Bessie Rodriguez, Santos’ 77-year-old mother, at Oakland Cemetery, while observing the 48th anniversary of her son’s murder.
“On behalf of the Dallas Police Department, as a father, I am sorry,” García said. “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.”
Hilda Ramirez Duarte, a community leader and activist with the League of United Latin American Citizens, said in that moment García showed what other chiefs haven’t: respect for the Latino community in Dallas.
“The fact that he could humble himself and take the fall for somebody else’s fault and be real,” said Ramirez Duarte. “Humble enough to say, ‘No fui yo, pero represento al departamento,’ I’ll take it, I’ll take it as mine [fault].”
Ramirez Duarte’s relationship with the chief started when she sent him a message on LinkedIn after the announcement that he would be the next chief. She wanted to introduce herself and offer any help for him in meeting the Latino community.
García called her that night and they spoke for two hours.
It was the first sign to Ramirez Duarte that Dallas was gaining a leader who cared about who lived in the community.
She said after their conversation she felt he was “raza,” a term used colloquially to refer to someone who is “cool and humble from the hood.”
García has always been proud of his heritage. He has the word “Boricua” tattooed on his left arm, which is used to describe someone from Puerto Rico. In his office, his country’s blue, white, and red flag hangs on the wall.
Ramirez Duarte said such small gestures further helped García build trust with the Latino community.
Those instances when García used his cultural awareness and language skills to authentically connect have built a foundation of trust but also set expectations for the next chief.
“We need to keep working,” Arévalo said, “not only to fight crime but also to pay attention to morality and to connect with the community. It is the only way we will be able to combat our problems if we build trust between our leaders and our people.”
She has a piece of advice for the future leader of the police department, regardless of whether he or she is Latino.
“If you speak the language but do not know the culture, you will not fit in,” she said. “However, if your Spanish is broken but you know the culture, you will fit in.”
García also shared some advice for his successor.
“Recognize your stakeholders,” he said. “Embrace the emotional bank account you share with all of them. Be present, and be responsive to their needs.”
Staff writer Kelli Smith contributed to this report.
