The San Antonio Police Department cadets honor 62 officers who have been killed in the line of duty during a Memorial Service at the San Antonio Police Training Academy on Friday, May 26, 2023.
Carlos Javier Sanchez/Contributor
San Antonio Express-News
Molly Smith, Staff Writer
The city signed an amended contract in early July with Carlos Aponte, who Police Chief William McManus described as a consulting partner of Alexander Weiss.
The city hired Weiss last summer to determine whether the San Antonio Police Department has enough staff in its patrol division and support and investigative units, which include the homicide, sex crimes, financial crimes and robbery units.
Weiss had finished analyzing patrol staffing levels when he died in February. He'd producing a 20-slide presentation for the city that became the basis of SAPD’s plan to hire 360 additional officers over the next five years. Those hires will help the department achieve a 60-40 split between the time officers spend on “proactive policing” — or crime prevention — and responding to calls, McManus said.
Currently, officers spend about 60 percent of their “on call.”
SAPD has requested funding for 100 new patrol officers in the next fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30 — a request the mayor and nearly the entire City Council have embraced.
At the time of his death, Weiss had collected $40,000 of the $140,000 city contract.
The amended contract notes that Aponte “will provide a specialized and comprehensive analysis on how the SAPD can most effectively and efficiently utilize its resources to inform future decisions related to department patrol and support unit staffing allocation and deployment to continue its efforts to reduce crime, lessen response time to calls for service, and increase community engagement.”
Aponte is a director with Puerto Rico-based V2A Consulting.
He will examine SAPD staffing needs in light of Texas House Bill 3106, better known as “Molly Jane’s Law.” In effect since 2019, the state law requires police agencies to enter information on sexual assault investigations — including the suspect’s name, date of birth and details ofthe offense — into an FBI database.
Though the amended contract sets an Aug. 31 deadline for the final report, McManus told the City Council last week that the remainder of the staffing analysis will be finished sometime this fall.
“The parties have exchanged drafts and additional questions have been posed to the contractor to address,” Lt. Michelle Ramos, an SAPD spokesperson, said in a statement.