San Antonio Report
by Iris Dimmick
Bexar County Commissioners on Tuesday approved a 15-month, $100,000 contract with UT Health Houston School of Public Health in San Antonio to evaluate and make recommendations to improve how the county processes people who are arrested.
Nearly everyone arrested by a local law enforcement agency is ultimately taken to the Justice Intake and Assessment Annex (JIAA), which opened in 2018 and hasn’t been assessed for efficiency or best practices since, according to lead researcher Alexander Testa, an assistant professor at the university.
Testa and his team will evaluate how arrested people flow through the JIAA, including procedures to determine the need for mental health and substance abuse services as well as bond processes and other pre-trial programs.
The study will commence during a time of heightened attention on the Bexar County Adult Detention Center and violence against law enforcement.
Earlier this month, a man who was arrested while experiencing homelessness died in jail. Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said he was mentally ill. The month of September was also abnormally dangerous for San Antonio police officers, sparking a rift between Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales and SAPD Chief William McManus that led to the formation of a joint city and county committee to identify gaps and ways to improve the criminal justice system.
Though the idea of the intake study was conceived nearly a year ago, commissioners pressed researchers to consider widening the scope of the study in the future to offer specific recommendations to stem the release of repeat violent offenders from jail.
“We need to figure out how information flows from the arrest … through this intake process up to the magistrate, up then to the district court judges — where perhaps a repeat offender bonds out again,” said Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai.
The JIAA is where magistrate judges decide whether arrested individuals will go to jail or be released on bond.
“We have some flaws and gaps in our system” from the point of arrest to exiting the jail, said Sakai, who suggested that Testa and other researchers become familiar with the joint committee in order to widen their scope.
Testa said he would work with the city and county to align their work and avoid duplicative efforts.
“We’re diving deep into it and we’re not just looking at efficiency and not just looking at the cost to the county, but ultimately the public safety outcomes,” Testa said.
The study will also review various data systems — used by county and city magistrates, the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, SAPD and other law enforcement agencies like school district police departments — and make recommendations on streamlining technology and data collection across the system, Testa said.
This particular study can not possibly identify all the gaps in the entire criminal justice system, but better data management can make answering those questions easier in the future, he said. It’s also possible that the scope could be expanded even further to analyze more processes, should the county amend the contract.
“Criminal justice is a large machine and it’s quickly changing,” Testa said. “The top priorities [change] as new issues come up. … We’re here to give the county the answers to the questions that they want and find a way to be flexible in that as the project develops.”
Meanwhile, researchers with UTSA commissioned by the City of San Antonio are working on the Bexar County Case Processing Study that will look at each criminal case over the last five years from arrest to final disposition.
The results of that study are likely to be released next spring or summer, officials have said.
But the county isn’t waiting while the problem is studied, Sakai said. The joint committee has already identified “gaps and flaws” to address before the data comes back.
Earlier this month, commissioners approved a new contract with Axon Enterprise for a new evidence management system to align with the Axon products used by the sheriff’s office and SAPD.
“That’s an example of trying to make our system better so that our, our community is a safer place,” Sakai said.