San Antonio Report
by Iris Dimmick
The city’s hot spot policing strategy, part of a broader plan to reduce violent crime, has showed promising results in its first four months, police officials and researchers said Wednesday.
“We’re … cautiously optimistic that these trends will continue,” said Michael Smith, a UTSA criminology and criminal justice professor and director of the university’s Center for Applied Community and Policy Research. The city hired UTSA last year to develop the Violent Crime Reduction plan, which uses hot spot policing and aims to reduce instances of violent crime in selected neighborhoods by making officers more visible.
“We know that putting police officers in lighted patrol cars in hot spots is an effective strategy with many years of evidence to show that that’s true,” Smith said as he updated San Antonio City Council members on the plan’s progress. “It’s not going to change the underlying conditions, though.”
Those underlying conditions will need to be addressed in subsequent phases of the plan.
The 36 most violence-prone hot spots identified across San Antonio — just 100 square meters, or about 330 square feet — where officers simply sat in parked police vehicles with their lights on for 15- to 20-minute intervals saw significantly less crime than before.
“We know from a great deal of research that violent crime happens in a relatively [low] number of places and is committed by a relatively [low] number of people,” Smith said.
Violent crime in San Antonio has increased by 47% citywide over the last three years, which was the backdrop for the hot spot effort.
Since putting the beginnings of the program into place, the first round of hot spots saw a 25% decrease in violent crime in January and February, at the same time San Antonio overall saw about an 11% decrease in violent crime compared to the first two months of last year.
The next round of hot spots saw a nearly 41% decrease in violent crime compared to March and April of last year, while violent crime decreased 9.5% citywide during the same period.
SAPD started with 28 hot spots during the first, two-month round. Seventeen of those continued to be hot spots in the second round, as they continued to have high volumes of violent crimes reported.
The additional presence of officers did not translate to more arrests in the hot spots, just less crime, SAPD Chief William McManus told the council on Wednesday.
Officers assigned to hot spots are not supposed to engage with people in the area unless there’s an emergency or violent crime taking place, he said.
“This is not about making arrests or shaking people down or doing anything else [other] than being visible at these locations,” McManus said.
And there is no consistent evidence so far that the crimes that were reduced due to the hot spot effort were simply being committed elsewhere, Smith added. As part of UTSA’s analysis, they are also tracking crime in the immediate area outside the hot spots.
The hot spot plan focuses on violent “street crimes,” he said, which researchers defined as murder, non-negligent homicide, aggravated assault or deadly conduct with at least one victim, and robbery. It does not include family violence.
After implementing a similar plan that UTSA developed in 2021, the city of Dallas saw a decrease in violent crime, down 12% overall from 2020, according to city data.
It’s too soon to tell if the hot spot initiative is the cause of San Antonio’s overall decrease in violent crime, Smith said, but he will have a better understanding once UTSA has a year’s worth of data to analyze.
Smith said he will return to City Council this summer with a more in-depth analysis of six months of data.
After the initial hot spots phase, the next phase of the plan will involve a team of staff from various city departments and community partners to address the underlying conditions in the area that contribute to crime — be it physical, such as poor lighting, or service-based, like a lack of daycare or recreation opportunities.
If further intervention is needed in a specific area, the plan calls for a third phase that uses “focused deterrence” efforts to either rehabilitate repeat offenders or prosecute them.
UTSA’s Michael Smith addresses City Council members on Wednesday.
Credit: Brenda Bazán / San Antonio Report
Several council members, including Mayor Ron Nirenberg, emphasized the need for community input in these neighborhood-level crime interventions.
“I think we all have theories around the table about what is causing some of the increase in certain types of crime,” Nirenberg said. “But also checking your math based on the real-world data and stories that are coming from the neighborhoods of our community is incredibly important.”
City Manager Erik Walsh said community input will be part of the interagency team’s work, which is slated to start implementing those interventions in January after UTSA assists the city in identifying the causes of violence in those hot spots.
The team will start by addressing one hot spot and then expand to more, Smith said.
The second and third phases of the Violent Crime Reduction Plan are critical to its success, Smith said, but none of this is a wholesale solution.
“Hot spot policing is not going to solve the violent crime problem in San Antonio,” he said, “it’s going to require an all-of-government approach — it’s going to require the community, absolutely.”
In total, the three-year Violent Crime Reduction Plan plan and its implementation will cost the city nearly $3.7 million: $230,000, which goes toward UTSA’s development of the plan, while the rest will fund the hiring of 38 police officers to support its implementation.
While most council members generally supported the plan, some took issue with how the data was presented. Councilman John Courage (D10) and others requested that raw data and totals, in addition to percentages, be shared regarding crime increases and decreases.
Smith responded that UTSA will include such data tables in the next presentation to council.
Councilwoman Teri Castillo (D5) questioned why the city was paying UTSA to develop the plan in the first place.
Castillo called out a metric in the report that showed substations that had, on average, officers wait a few minutes longer in the hot spots actually saw increases in violent crime.
“Can you help me understand why this substation that has officers at hot spots the longest saw an increase in crime?” she asked Smith.
He responded: “Because I can show you another set of data in the next [round] … that will show you the exact opposite pattern. … There’s no correlation there.”
After more back-and-forth, Castillo remained unconvinced. Smith concluded the exchange with, “I’m sorry, you’re wrong.”
After the meeting, Smith declined to comment further on the unusually tense moment.