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Three San Antonio police officers stand accused of murdering a woman in the throes of a mental breakdown.
Police Chief William McManus has been very critical of the actions of his officers that night — saying they should have employed the city’s mental health unit.
Texas Public Radio Accountability Reporter Paul Flahive spoke with Chief McManus and Deputy City Manager Maria Villagómez to discuss the deadly encounter between city police and Melissa Perez and what it says about the state of police response to mental health calls.
Flahive: Can you talk about the mental health unit in terms of do you know if it was available at the time of this? And what would you have hoped they had been able to do if they were on scene?
McManus: It was available. We have our mental health unit that works seven days a week from seven in the morning until 11 at night. And after that, we have a sergeant and two officers on-call in the event that they're needed to respond. And what simply didn't happen was there was no request made for the mental health unit to respond. That was the issue here. We have no gap in our training or our policies that would have allowed for this to happen. It was simply that the supervisor, nor any of the two other officers who were involved, no one called for the mental health unit.
Flahive: Watching the video — as I'm sure you had several times — does it look like they are these officers are responding to a mental health call or are they treating it in some other way?
McManus: I don't know what their mindset was. I can just tell you what happened and that was that they didn't treat it like an escalated mental health call. The proper response would have been for them to simply leave and we would deal with it at another time in a way that would not have put Ms. Perez in the situation that she was in.
Flahive: At any time, did see them using de-escalation techniques or discussing it? I know we've received an edited version that's pretty concise, so I don't know if those were discussions that took place at another time? But in your recall of the video and watching it, was was it discussed or was it employed?
McManus: Well, no, there were no tactics that were used that would have been appropriate for a mental health call.
Flahive: Does it trouble you that a 14-year veteran of the force, along with several more junior officers, didn't make this request to the mental health unit? Does it say anything to you about whether or not this unit is properly understood?
McManus: No, it's properly understood. Calls like this happen every day, many times a day, and they're handled appropriately. And the answer to your question — the short answer to your question — is yes, it troubles me.
Flahive: Is it unusual for a sergeant who's a supervisor to be for lack of a better term, on the front lines, trying to get into an apartment, trying to breach? Is that a normal practice for a supervisor?
McManus: Again, the short answer to your question is no.
Flahive: And does Sergeant Flores have a history of — this is my word obviously not yours but reckless action or cowboy-ism — in terms of past disciplinary action.
McManus: Not that I'm familiar with.
Flahive: TCOLE offers mental health officer training. Do you do you think enough SAPD officers have that certification or or do you see a value for that? Or do you feel like your own training surpasses it in some way?
McManus: I do see a value in that. And let me just go back to 2008. Back in 2008, we started our mental health unit with two officers and a sergeant.
And to this day, it's developed into a 20-person unit to include a supervisor and a couple detectives.
Back in and around that same time circa 2007-ish, we offered a crisis intervention training class, a 40-hour class, which was voluntary. Shortly after we offered that voluntary class, we made it mandatory that every officer in the department be trained in crisis intervention. So that's been happening for almost 17 years.
Flahive: How often is it recertified or how often is it done?
McManus: Cadet level and then periodically at in-service training. But, you know, a lot of what CIT is, it's specific to mental health, but a lot of it is simply de-escalation as as it applies to dealing with someone in a mental health crisis. But obviously, there's no lack of exposure to that training.
Flahive: In terms of the investment in mental health services and intervention, Ms Villagómez, do you feel like the city is doing enough to invest in this?
Villagómez: We have increased investment in mental health and more recently through the ARPA funds we invested, the City Council approved $26 million for services for services to the community, primarily through our nonprofit agencies.
Internally here, the city of San Antonio we have services that we offer through our Metro Health Department, through the police department and the mental health unit. And now with SA core as well as services through our Department of Human Services.
So there's still much more work to do in that area. And that's something that we continue to discuss with the council. And I know that city council is very interested in our work as it relates to mental health. Should we do more? Yes. And in light of all the other priorities that we have as an organization.
Flahive: And in terms of the MHU you I know you guys got an expansion grant last year for about $1,000,000 from the feds. And in that award, it said something along the lines of even with the expansion, you would still only be able to address about 25% of those weekend and evening calls. Do you feel that SAPD needs more funding for MHU or should be putting more providers out in the field in another way?
Villagómez: I think what you're referring to is that $1 million grant that we got — I believe it was a year ago — to add additional overtime hours to the mental health unit.
The mental health unit in 2022 handled 5200 calls. And this fiscal year so far, we're close to 2000 calls that have been addressed by the mental health unit.
One of the things that we are doing to enhance the services that we provide to the community is that our police officers, in addition to the crisis intervention training, they're going through a more advanced mental health training — similar to what the mental health officers and the mental health unit receive.
And that process is going to take us about three years.
Now, more recently, you may have seen that the city council approved the expansion of the SA Core. And the SA Core is a unit that responds to 911 calls directly, different than our mental health unit. And we have two more teams that are coming up in January of 2024. And as we continue that evaluation, we’ll continue to assess if we should be adding more teams to the SA core.
