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Luz Elena Huffman has only good things to say about the San Antonio Police Department’s Mental Health Unit (MHU).
“The Mental Health Unit has been just a wonderful, wonderful agency for not only my son but for me, because it gives me peace of mind that someone is out there, that in case I need someone, they’re there,” she said.
Huffman credits one MHU officer with keeping her son, now 40 years old, out of trouble and out of the hospital. Regular visits over years, she explained, led to a strong bond between him and her son.
But she says her son’s experiences with regular SAPD officers have been awful.
Her son, who experiences hallucinations and delusions, made a call to the FBI in March that was forwarded to SAPD.
Huffman says he was home alone when officers broke in and violently removed him. “They literally put him to the ground, hit him, and dragged him out to the front of the house,” she said.
Officers told her that her son was under arrest for assaulting a police officer when she arrived.
But charges were dismissed a week later after MHU officers came to the home and took statements from Huffman and her son.
She’s now fearful of calling SAPD for help because of the March incident and the killing of Melissa Perez by SAPD in June.
SAPD officers responded to Perez’s apartment complex after the fire department told them that they found Perez cutting fire alarm wires.
Perez, who had schizophrenia, told firefighters and officers that she believed the FBI was using the fire alarms to spy on her.
Perez fled from officers into her apartment after being questioned. When they attempted to get into her locked apartment, she threw a candlestick and brandished a hammer.
Three officers then shot and killed her through her screen door. They have since been charged with murder.
Huffman said regular SAPD officers don’t receive adequate training. “The officers need more training,” she said. “They need an ongoing training because they need to understand and they need to learn how to handle situations.”
Columba Wilson said she called SAPD’s non-emergency number in March when her grandson Christian scratched her badly enough to make her bleed.
He was asleep in bed when officers arrived. Wilson said they insisted on taking him to jail. The 75-year-old said "no" and tried to block the door.
“Another police [officer] grabbed my left arm and twisted, and twisted so hard,” she said. “And they had me handcuffed and threw me against the wall.”
Wilson said her son was put in cuffs and taken away. She said someone from the district attorney’s office contacted her shortly after the arrest and got Christian sent back home without charges.
Wilson added that her grandson didn’t speak or eat for days after the incident. She said an internal affairs officer blamed her for what happened to Christian.
“The answer was, ‘Well, we didn’t call you, you called us,’” she said.
Wilson said Perez’s killing solidified her position on the police. “My grandson would have been aggressive,” she said. “I’m afraid they would have shot him. Yes, I am afraid. And I will never call the police again.”
An SAPD statement said officers must make an arrest for any family violence incident. It explained that officers were found to have acted appropriately following an investigation into the incident.
The department did not make Police Chief William McManus available to TPR for an interview.
Parents shared the opinion that MHU’s officers were valuable resources. They were also unanimous that they weren’t available often enough. In 2022, the MHU responded to 5,200 calls. There were more than 32,000 total mental-health related calls to SAPD in the same year.
“I think we need to look at what best practices are in other cities, what’s working," said Doug Beach, the executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in San Antonio, "And it feels like we’re totally under resourced, and we need to take a fresh look.”
Beach said Denver’s Support Team Assisted Response program (STAR) is one place San Antonio should look to.
Unlike the MHU, STAR is a separate entity from Denver law enforcement.
Evan Thompkins, a STAR program specialist, said it started with a co-responders program in 2016.
“Mental health clinicians respond with police to specific calls,” he explained. “While that program is great, during that time, 2016 to 2017, there kind of started to be this recognition that some of these lower-level calls didn’t really need a police officer there.”
He said community activists and Denver city officials reviewed an alternate response program in Oregon in 2019. In 2020, they launched a six-month pilot program in Denver that expanded into the STAR program.
Thompkins said STAR has responded to 12,000 calls since its inception, and its personnel has never called on law enforcement for backup.
He added that STAR also provides services like transport to shelters or medical treatment centers, which he said law enforcement probably wouldn’t do.
“We have eight vans in service, so it’s 16 teams, so each team is made up of one behavioral health clinician and one EMT or paramedic,” he said.
That’s 32 on-the-ground staff members for a city of roughly 700,000. Thompkins said they plan to expand.
The MHU in San Antonio has 20 total staff. A few more staffers work with the San Antonio Community Outreach and Resiliency Effort (CORE) team, which responds to mental health calls for a small subsection of the city. The teams handle a city twice Denver’s size.
Thompkins said STAR costs roughly $5.5 million per year. The money comes from the city’s general fund and a sales tax initiative approved by Denver voters in 2020.
San Antonio’s public safety budget, which includes police and fire, topped $900 million in fiscal year 2023.
Beach, the San Antonio mental health advocate, said the city’s current policy is failing and big change is needed.
“We’re stretched across the board, every community is,” he said. “But that’s no excuse for operating the way we do. And I think that incrementalism — adding one unit here, two officers there — that’s not an answer.”
As city and police officials consider new ways to handle San Antonio’s mental health crisis, families like Huffman’s and Wilson’s will continue to struggle with their loved ones and wonder who they can turn to for help.
