Former Sheriff Lupe Valdez in the Alan Ross Texas Freedom Parade
Former Sheriff Lupe Valdez makes a bid to reclaim her old job
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com
Don’t suggest former Sheriff Lupe Valdez is coming out of retirement for a chance at winning back her old job with Dallas County. Valdez hasn’t been retired; she’s been hard at work as police officer in DeSoto ever since her 2018 bid to become Texas governor came up short against Greg Abbott.
But why she’s running for sheriff again? Because, she said, a number of her former deputies have approached her and asked her to run. Many sheriff’s department employees aren’t happy with the way things have been running since she left, Valdez said, and folks have encouraged her to come back and fix some problems.
When former District Attorney Craig Watkins passed away in December, the honor guard at his funeral consisted of employees for the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office. Valdez said at that funeral, officers in the honor guard came up to her, one after the other, and told her, “I’m so glad you’re coming back.”
She said a number of her former staff members have told her that if she doesn’t win the election in 2024, they will leave the sheriff’s office. She said she told them, “If I do win, you’ve got to give me time,” and they’ve agreed because, they told her, “At least we’d know there would be someone in charge who cares.”
First and foremost on the list of issues that need to be addressed is the county jail, which has failed inspection under the current sheriff, Valdez said, adding that she’s just the one to take care of that.
After all, she said, she’s done it before.
When she was first elected to office in 2004, the jail had failed inspection, and, Valdez said, it took her over a year to get it up to standard. But once it passed inspection under her leadership, it never failed again as long as she was in office.
In the process of bringing the jail up to standards, she recalled having to power wash sewage off the floors and walls and rebuild the facility from the ground up without being able to close the building while doing it.
Lupe Valdez speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 2016
“It was like fixing an airplane while it was in the air,” she said.
Rebuilding the jail meant replacing everything from plumbing to locks on the cells. The locks weren’t working? No, Valdez said, and she’s been told that’s among the current problems as well.
Locks not working in a jail can’t be a good thing.
Neither is the number of resignations among sheriff’s department staff.
For three years, Valdez said, she has listened to people: “Tell me why you’re quitting,” she’d ask, and, over and over again, her former employees told her they didn’t feel valued. They didn’t feel that anyone cared about them.
A few of those former employees had been fired. Valdez said they told her they were fired in retribution for trying to point out what was wrong in the sheriff’s department.
Valdez said that during her tenure as sheriff, when an employee in her department retired, she would spend an hour of their last day on duty with them. That included around-the-clock staffing, she said, so she often found herself working in the middle of the night just to say a simple thank you.
Valdez said one person who had retired after Valdez left told her that, after 40 years with the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department, she never heard from the current sheriff when she retired.
Valdez said that when she first took office, the department was a “good ole boys” scene. Prisoners, she said, were frequently beaten, but “I stopped all of that.”
She said her first term in office was difficult — miserable, even — as she stepped up to assert her authority and change the “good ol’ boys” culture. Those who decided they weren’t going to change their way of doing things were eventually fired.
But, Valdez said, most of her employees found her to be, while firm, also very fair.
Valdez said she started to gain respect as sheriff when the jail finally passed inspection.
The former sheriff also noted other current issues in the department that are unacceptable and must be rectified. For example, she said, an inmate was found dead after 14 hours in a cell. “He wasn’t checked,” Valdez said.
Prisoners, she said must be checked on every few hours, at least. If this situation was a result of a staffing shortage, that shortage has to be addressed, has to change, she declared, because lives are at risk.
And, Valdez said, two women inmates have reported being raped in the jail. “There’s no way a man should have gotten to the women,” Valdez insisted.
Transgender Policy
While she was sheriff, Valdez met with members of the transgender community who, she said, first approached her at the Round-Up Saloon. They told her trans people were getting beaten up when they were arrested by Dallas County Sheriff’s Office. Together, Valdez and the community representatives developed a jail policy that the justice department has since used as a template for policies there, she said.
Lupe Valdez during her previous tenure as Dallas County Sheriff
The policy is more nuanced than simply housing trans offenders with other trans folks. Valdez explained there are more than 20 items used to determine to which holding tank someone who has been brought to the jail will be assigned. For example, violent offenders are never placed with nonviolent offenders. Related to that, felony suspects aren’t placed with misdemeanor suspects. And those under arrest for the first time aren’t placed with repeat offenders.
If there were five people who fit together, they could open a holding tank for them. If there were fewer than five in a group, there unfortunately just wasn’t room for a separate tank, Valdez explained. But trans people were given the option of being held in a cell by themselves.
And, she said, she had put a stop to trans people from getting beaten up in the jail.
Experience
Valdez first came to the job of sheriff with a broad range of law enforcement experience on her resumé. She was a captain in the U.S. Army Reserve, had been an investigative agent with several federal agencies and, finally, had served as a senior agent with the Department of Homeland Security.
Her more recent experience includes her three-plus terms as sheriff — including speaking in uniform in front of tens of thousands of people at the 2016 Democratic Party Convention.
During her fourth term in office, Valdez resigned from her position as sheriff to run for governor of Texas. Valdez was one of 10 candidates in the 2018 Democratic Primary — including gay Dallas businessman Jeffrey Payne. Valdez won 43 percent of the vote in the primary, falling short of the 50 percent threshold to win outright. She and Andrew White, son of former Texas Gov. Mark White, went into the runoff, with Valdez eventually winning the contest 53 percent to 47 percent.
Despite working with a paltry campaign budget of only $2 million and much smaller campaign infrastrure, Valdez captured 42.5 percent of the vote in the general election, a similar percentage of the vote that Beto O’Rourke won four years later when he, with a budget of almost $70 million, challenged Abbott for governor.
And Valdez continues to hone her law enforcement skills as a member of the DeSoto Police Department. She said DeSoto’s police chief used to be one of her chiefs when she was sheriff, and one change she’d like to make if she is re-elected will be hiring him back as one of her chiefs again. n
