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Black residents of Bexar County made up an apparent disproportionate number of law enforcement shootings in the period between 2016 and 2022. Black residents made up 15% of the 120 total shootings in the county, but accounted for only around 8% of the county’s total population.
The San Antonio Police Department contributed 97 of those 120 shootings, and it is the law enforcement agency responsible for the apparent shooting disparity.
SAPD shot 16 Black residents, 16.5% of all of the department’s shootings between 2016 and 2022. Black San Antonians made up roughly 7% of the city’s population during the time period.
During the same period, SAPD shot 14 white residents, which was 14.3% of all SAPD shootings. White San Antonians made up approximately 24% of the city’s population during the period analyzed.
Ananda Tomas, the executive director of local police reform group ACT4SA, said the data points to a clear problem in San Antonio.
“I mean, initial reaction is that this is sad,” she said. “I think this is evidence that there is an issue here. The same issue that we’re seeing all across the country is happening here.”
Tomas said she’s worked with numerous families of loved ones killed by Bexar County law enforcement agencies like 13-year-old AJ Hernandez, who was killed by SAPD last year, and military veteran Damien Daniels, who was killed by the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office in 2020.
The data collected and analyzed by TPR cannot prove discriminatory practices on their own for a number of reasons — population data is not the best comparison for police shootings, and there are many potential factors other than race or ethnicity that contribute to an officer making a decision to shoot someone.
A spokesperson for SAPD’s Public Information Office described the department’s concerns with TPR’s analysis in a statement.
“Relying solely on demographic data fails to consider other crucial factors that contribute to such situations, including the behavior of suspects at the time of the incident,” the spokesperson said. “It is essential to acknowledge that in many of the cases with data you provided, the suspects were armed with deadly weapons and posed a significant threat to officers and others, leading to the use of deadly force.”
Twelve of the 16 Black San Antonians SAPD shot between 2016 and 2022 were identified in the department’s “officer involved shooting” reports as having “carried, exhibited, or used a deadly weapon.” A “deadly weapon” is broadly defined but often refers to firearms or knives.
Eleven of 14 white San Antonians shot by SAPD were also indicated as carrying, exhibiting, or using a deadly weapon.
The SAPD spokesperson also said that all SAPD shootings are reviewed by the department’s Internal Affairs Department, the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office’s Civil Rights Division, and a grand jury. The vast majority of officers who fire their weapons are not found to have committed any wrongdoing.
But despite the data’s limitations, it still raises fair questions about how the department’s officers decide to discharge their firearms during interactions with the city’s residents.
San Antonio District 2 Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez said any analysis of San Antonio police shootings requires an acknowledgment of the city’s history.
“People can grow up on the West Side of San Antonio, on the South Side of San Antonio, the North Side of San Antonio, and have very little interaction with Black people,” McKee-Rodriguez said. “And that’s a problem. That comes down to our city’s history of racial segregation, which now is economic segregation that was rooted in racial segregation. These biases exist not only in white people, but in other minority groups as well, where Black people just aren’t treated the same.”
He said that helps perpetuate ideas about the supposed danger of Black people proliferate in non-Black communities without being challenged by actual experiences with Black San Antonians.
Tomas said the number one way to reduce police shootings is to reduce the interactions between armed officers and the city’s residents.
“That’s why we’ve been pushing to have alternative responders for mental health crises or to have policies like cite-and-release or cite-and-divert, because it’s the number one thing you can do to save lives is to reduce interactions,” Tomas said. “And they’re not doing enough.”
She said cite-and-release programs like Bexar County’s have low reoffender rates, which means less crime and fewer opportunities for police interactions that can lead to shootings.
Tomas said the June SAPD shooting of Melissa Perez, a woman experiencing an apparent mental health crisis in her apartment, is a prime example of why officers should be replaced by unarmed mental health experts for these types of calls. Three officers who shot at Perez have been charged with murder.
Tomas pointed to Denver, Colorado, as an example of how San Antonio should change its approach to mental illness. Denver city officials launched the Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) program in 2020, which uses EMTs and mental health clinicians to respond to thousands of mental health calls each year.
Nick Hudson, a policy and advocacy strategist at the ACLU of Texas, said officers are asked to do too much.
“In general, we invest too little in crime prevention strategies like housing and alleviating poverty, and we’re sending police to too many situations where their presence is unnecessary and sometimes even harmful,” Hudson said. “It is just common sense that police are not the right answer to every single societal problem.”
Tomas said the city has been unwilling to try new strategies that could lead to lower crime and fewer shootings.
“I think that specifically Ron Nirenberg, but several other city council members, rose to the political moment to say what folks wanted to hear, but never actually took the steps to implement safer policing or to reduce dangerous policing in our community,” Tomas said. “They haven’t funded big pilot models.”
Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s spokesperson said he was unavailable for an interview, but sent several written statements about steps the city’s taken since 2020 to improve policing in response to the SAPD shooting data.
“Since 2020, with City Council’s direction, the San Antonio Police Department announced a permanent ban on ‘no knock’ warrants as well as prohibiting chokeholds and shooting at a moving vehicle,” Nirenberg’s statement said. “We have changed the city’s mental health protocol to put an emphasis on de-escalating confrontations. Additionally, we now have a policy for the timely release of body-worn camera footage. And last year, the City of San Antonio and the San Antonio Police Officers Association approved a new contract that strengthened the police department’s disciplinary process.”
It’s hard to understand what kind of impact these policies have had, especially when there have been high profile cases like Perez’s killing and the October shooting of Erik Cantu Jr. In each case, police did not follow training that told them to de-escalate mental health crises and to not shoot at moving vehicles.
For Tomas and others, these policies don’t fully address the problem.
“I just think we need to really look at how we can offload more from police officers’ plates, how we can spread these types of crisis responses and interactions to other folks, and instead of adding more police to police our community … looking at investing in those communities and what they need,” she said. “They need afterschool programs, they need infrastructure, they need help with diapers for their kids, right, access to food. Those are the things that we can truly do to build a safer community that’s not reliant on police that’s going to save Black and brown lives, period.”
The city’s most recent proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2024 includes funds for 100 new SAPD patrol officers as part of a planned addition of 360 officers over the next three to five years.
