San Antonio Report
by Iris Dimmick
San Antonio’s police chief and Bexar County’s district attorney — whose relationship has been strained recently — have at least agreed to meet as part of a larger group to discuss the city’s response to a recent string of shootings that have injured police officers.
It’s unclear when that convening between District Attorney Joe Gonzales, Police Chief William McManus, as well as Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar, criminal court judges and magistrates will take place, however, or whether it will be open to the public.
Gonzales and McManus traded several barbs earlier this month regarding who is to blame for the recent shootings involving suspects who had violent criminal records and were out on bail or parole.
Six officers were shot and wounded over a two-week period and three suspects were killed.
McManus has pointed to the lack of harsher bail requests from the District Attorney’s Office for violent offenders and dropping charges against defendants. Gonzales countered that magistrate judges set bail conditions — and cited a case that his attorneys couldn’t pursue because of a lack of evidence provided by police.
They’ve spoken privately since the rift, and participated in a public town hall meeting last week to answer questions from the community, which concluded when Gonzales was prevented from offering his closing remarks by hecklers in the crowd gathered inside the parish hall at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church.
Beyond the finger-pointing, the “blame” for violent recidivism rests on something far more nuanced than any single person or agency, said David Olson, a professor of criminology and co-director of the Center for Criminal Justice at Loyola University in Chicago: “Nobody is in charge. There is no single entity that we can blame because everything is so interconnected.”
‘Random’ events or a trend?
The out-of-the-ordinary spate of police shootings could be the result of random violence that coincidentally occurred over two weeks, said Michael Smith, professor of criminology and criminal justice at UTSA.
“Occasionally random events come together in a wave,” Smith said. “You have to be careful about drawing too strong of conclusions about the co-occurrence of random events.”
Late summer crime spikes are not unusual, Smith said.
The individual shootings and suspects were not connected in any meaningful way, said SAPD Deputy Chief Jesse Salame, other than the fact that the people who shot the officers were “career criminals.”
“That just shows how dangerous it is out there,” Salame said. “You know that there’s something going on in society … when people start shooting at the cops with regularity.”
When that happens, it’s “less safe for everybody,” he added. “When they feel emboldened or empowered to do that, that’s something that makes it scarier for everyone.”
Citywide, violent crime is down 14% this year, though data is not yet available from August through September, when the shootings occurred.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai are working on bringing law enforcement, district attorneys, judges and other criminal justice system leaders to the table to talk about the issue — but schedules have yet to align, they said.
“We both believe that the only thing that we need to do is work together, so we’re going to work together,” said Gonzales at the parish hall meeting, finding himself on defense as the families of victims present shouted accusations of corruption and incompetence.
If the meeting at St. Rose was any preview to the larger convening, the community can likely expect lingering tension between law enforcement, the district attorney’s office, judges, jails and prisons that each play a role in the criminal justice system.
The San Antonio Report asked McManus after the meeting if he was optimistic that the future convening would result in solutions. His response was flat.
“I’m optimistic that we’ll meet,” he said. “And we’ll talk about it. And we’ll see what we come up with.”
McManus said the public barbs he and Gonzales have traded don’t equal a lack of communication between SAPD and the District Attorney’s Office —and it’s not uncommon for him to go weeks or a month without speaking to Gonzales.
“A layer below [us], there’s conversation going on all the time to straighten out concerns or address issues that may arise,” he told reporters after the meeting.
“I made my concerns … very clear to everyone,” McManus said. “The next time that I speak about this will be [at] the venue” convened by the mayor and county judge.
“Until then, you know, it does me no good — it does no one any good — to continue to butt heads about this,” McManus said, who instigated the tension through public statements after the first few shootings occurred.
More questions
If that meeting occurs within the next six months, and there are indications it might, it will be without the benefit of an in-depth local study of how criminal cases are processed.
Many questions — and accusations — about which parts of the criminal justice system are leading to positive, negative or unintended outcomes, including the impact of bail amounts, will likely be answered by that study, commissioned by the City of San Antonio from UTSA.
Smith is leading a research team at UTSA for the Bexar County Case Processing Study that will look at each case over the last five years “from arrest to final disposition,” he said.
“We should have some better answers to these questions over the next six to nine months, but we don’t have a good answer, right here as we sit either locally or nationally for that matter,” Smith said.
There has long been a dearth of publicly accessible data regarding criminal case outcomes, he said.
“Decisions by judges and magistrates to issue bonds, how those are made and what the outcomes are: That’s a black box. No one knows,” he said. “There’s no transparency there.”
Magistrate judges, who make rulings on bail and bond conditions, are not elected but they are appointed by elected district court judges, Smith said. Few people “who vote for judges have a clue what their practice has been in setting bail and bond.”
Gonzales also brought up the role of magistrate judges during the community meeting.
“They don’t work for me, I don’t work for them,” Gonzales said. “They don’t necessarily have to accept our [bail] recommendations. … They are independent of the DA’s office. It’s supposed to be that way because we’re litigants — were advocates for victims and so we have to have that separation.”
In a wide-ranging interview with the San Antonio Report last month, Gonzales said attorneys in his office make bail recommendations to judges that balance public safety with the rights of the accused.
Keeping everyone in jail who has been arrested is an “unrealistic goal,” Gonzales said. “Everyone that’s arrested for a crime has a right to bond out. That’s what the law provides” with few exceptions, according to the Texas Constitution.
And it’s possible that the accused could be out on bail for months, sometimes more than a year, depending on when a judge and jury are available to hear the case.
“We may want to move a case along as swiftly as possible and we want to bring justice to the victim of a crime, but the accused has a right to his day in court,” Gonzales said.
A historic tension
Tension between police chiefs and district attorneys is “not atypical,” Smith said.
“There’s been a wave of reform DAs elected in big cities around the country,” he said, meaning they exercise more discretion on who they prosecute; typically fewer low-level, nonviolent offenders. “That has put them at tension with police chiefs.”
Gonzales, a Democrat, was elected in 2019 and has focused efforts on prosecuting violent crimes. That year, the District Attorney’s Office and law enforcement collaborated on an expanded cite-and-release policy that allows officers to ticket offenders for low-level offenses instead of sending them to jail.
“There historically hasn’t been a lot of tension between the police and prosecutors, because they usually went along with each other in a lot of ways,” Olson, of Loyola, said. Now police chiefs are more likely to be critical of progressive prosecutors who “are doing things that [police] see as less than strict with how they respond to crime.”
Across the country, there is a growing belief among criminal justice system leaders, particularly police chiefs, that the number of violent repeat offenders on the street is rising, Smith said
But it’s unclear if that’s actually the case, he said. “There’s not good research and data on it” locally or nationally.
A small UTSA pilot study that analyzed 153 random arrests in 2021 in Bexar County found that about 50% of the people who were arrested were released on bail or bond and about about 22% were rearrested in six months, Smith said.
And there is no perfect way to predict which violent offender will commit another violent crime while out on bail or parole, Olson said.
“There’s only one way you can guarantee that those outcomes won’t happen … that’s if you lock up everybody who’s charged with a crime forever,” he said, which would be an incredible violation of constitutional rights.
There’s also not a lot of evidence that suggests jail or prison deters crime or rehabilitates an individual, Olson said. “Maybe the fact that a person with a lengthy record [shot] a police officer is more reflective of the system’s failure to rehabilitate — or failure to seek rehabilitation as a goal and instead focus too much on punishment.”
What’s next
Sakai and Nirenberg have both said they want the future convening of criminal justice system leaders to lead to solutions.
“We have to look at this from arrest to when they reintegrate with the community,” Sakai told reporters this week. “Do we have sufficient resources? … We can’t just narrowly look at the repeat offender and point fingers. That’s not going to work.”
It’s unclear if this meeting will be open to the public.
It’s possible that the initial conversation will be held behind closed doors, Nirenberg said.
“It’s too early to say what this process will look like, but what hasn’t happened and needs to happen is a candid conversation between the stakeholders. And that’s what calling this meeting was about.”
The mayor wants to avoid too much distraction from the issues.
“This is not for performance, this is to find solutions,” he said.