{"id":471227,"date":"2026-10-20T04:14:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T04:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/471227\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T04:14:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T04:14:09","slug":"dallas-seeks-443-million-for-public-safety-facilities-including-police-evidence-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/471227\/","title":{"rendered":"Dallas seeks $443 million for public safety facilities, including police evidence room"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the 2026 midterm election<\/a> a little more than two weeks away, Dallas city leaders are making their biggest push yet to convince the public that the police and fire departments need a number of costly new facilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of five public safety projects in the $443 million referendum, Proposition A<\/a>, would fund a new Dallas police property room to store evidence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chief Daniel Comeaux<\/a> took CBS News Texas’ JD Miles and a city council member on a tour of the 54,000 square foot facility near downtown to show why it needs to be replaced.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“What you’re looking at now is organized chaos,” Comeaux said.<\/p>\n

The organized chaos Comeaux is referring to is the evidence property room the department has been using for 42 years. \u00a0<\/p>\n

“One of the things I’ve learned in the 19 months here is the city loves its police department, but it doesn’t love its facilities,” he said. “Our facility warehouse is going to be at 120% capacity, so all this is overflow.”<\/p>\n

The property room is not only overcrowded, according to DPD, but it’s also dangerous, and often takes on water, so tarp covers sexual assault DNA evidence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"snapshot-40.jpg<\/p>\n

“I think it’s important for people to see this,” said Willis. “It looks like an episode of ‘Hoarders’ in here, and you literally have boxes leaning in on aisles.”<\/p>\n

A new property room is one of five projects up for a vote in November for Dallas residents.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The others are a new fire station, 911 call center, police academy and gun range that the city says are all in shambles.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“You know what’s in shambles is our response times,” said Rudy Karimi, a vocal opponent of the $443 million rebuild of public safety facilities, arguing that there are higher priorities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“If this is such a good program, why aren’t they piecemealing it out and breaking it up in five different components and let us, we the people, choose?” Karimi said.<\/p>\n

But the chief insists the city has no choice. In the last 3 years alone, 145,000 new items have been cataloged and stored in the property room.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Much of the warehouse is full of recovered guns and stolen property, like hundreds of bicycles and some boxes labeled biohazard, which begs the question, why not just get rid of it?<\/p>\n

Comeaux says it has to be saved for trials, appeals and unsolved cases.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“It’s one thing to put you in jail, it’s another thing \u2014 you can’t get a conviction without a good property room,” Comeaux said. “You will lose convictions.”<\/p>\n

\n More from CBS News\n <\/p>\n

In:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With the 2026 midterm election a little more than two weeks away, Dallas city leaders are making their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,4081,75069],"class_list":["post-471227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-dallas-police-department","tag-texas-midterm-elections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}