The Department of Public Safety opened an office in east Oak Cliff on Tuesday to build strong relationships with the community and support youths while recruiting new troopers.
The Texas Department of Public Safety celebrated its new recruitment office at the Mark Cuban Heroes Center, the first outside a government building anywhere in the state, with a ribbon cutting Tuesday morning.
The Heroes Center is known for its basketball training and community resources, such as its annual Mother’s Day food giveaway that drew a line of cars over a mile long Tuesday morning. Trina Terrell-Andrews, CEO of the center, said it serves 150 young people a week. The center offers opportunities and life skills training, including professional wardrobe, etiquette, and grooming as well as classes in gardening and grilling.
She sees adding the recruitment office as another way to build up young community members.
“Our primary focus is to make sure that they get the opportunity to have the support that they need as they are going through life, no matter what their journey is or their career of choice is,” she said.
Terrell-Andrews said she has collaborated for years with DPS Sgt. Germaine Gaspard on community projects and the placement of a recruitment office at the center was a natural extension.
“We want to be that connector,” she said.
Gaspard, who left the field to become a recruiter two years ago, focuses on recruiting in North Texas. He said he wants the office to be a space for working with young people on professionalism and life skills as well as learning about a career at the Department of Public Safety.
“We want to help create pillars in the community,” he said. “As we create pillars in the community, some of those pillars will come to DPS, some may not, but the community wins when we have great people in the community pouring into other young people.”
State Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, attended the ribbon cutting Tuesday and commended DPS on opening the office. He told The Dallas Morning News that he and other legislators have long “encouraged DPS to be more creative and innovative in terms of its outreach.”
Royce said the new approach to recruitment builds a better understanding of DPS’s role, “not just looking at them as ‘police officers’ [but] an integrated part of the community.”
Terrell-Andrews expressed a similar view and told the DPS troopers present, “We have to make sure that our young people see you as the examples that you are.”
