San Antonio Police Department Mental Health Unit officers are being diverted to non-mental health call tasks, like taking calls from the intelligence-gathering Southwest Texas Fusion Center and training other officers.
National Alliance on Mental Illness San Antonio chapter President Doug Beach said the diversions are unacceptable seven months after Melissa Perez was killed by SAPD officers during a mental health crisis, and with a MHU field staff of only 16 officers.
“We’ve taken the people who were trained to make these mental health calls in the field, the mental health officers, we’ve taken them, put them into a training mode, put them into the fusion center calls, and then they’re used as backup for a patrol unit,” Beach said. “And I think very clearly what happened to Melissa Perez was a direct result of not sending a mental health unit.”
Two former officers are being prosecuted for murder over Perez’s death.
An SAPD spokesperson acknowledged that MHU officers are used to responding to Fusion Center calls and to train other officers, but said they also respond directly to mental health calls and support patrol officers responding to those calls.
Beach said MHU officers functioning as backup for patrol officers just doesn’t work and that patrol officers often end up escalating interactions, even when they approach the situation empathetically.
“What we saw with both Melissa Perez and what I’m afraid too many other instances, and people report to us all the time, [is] that the treatment they get when a patrol unit comes out — again, with a marked car, a person in a uniform with a gun — it escalates the situation, and too many times, the outcomes are not good,” he said.
Beach said families have told him that these outcomes are often arrests. Families who spoke with TPR after Perez’s death last year said they had terrible experiences with patrol units, including violence against themselves and their loved ones at the hands of SAPD officers.
MHU officers are highly trained and specially selected for the roles based on psychological evaluations that seek out individuals with high levels of empathy and balanced temperaments. Beach and families that have spoken with TPR have said the MHU officers offer excellent support services, and that some have formed deep relationships with the residents they serve. The problem, as they see it, is that there aren’t enough of them.
“I asked why we couldn’t use some of the money for the 100 new officers, why some of those couldn’t be mental health officers, and I didn’t get a good response. I didn’t get a response, really,” Beach said. “We have a system where we don’t send the right people to do the job. We send patrol officers.”
The City of San Antonio 2024 budget includes funding to hire 105 more uniformed police officers. The budget also includes funds to expand the SA Core Team services to 24/7; the units handle mental health calls and consist of a specially trained police officer, a paramedic, and a licensed clinician.
Beach said the $7.2 million expansion of the SA Core Teams in the 2024 budget doesn’t come close to meeting the need in San Antonio.
“They’re so far behind the curve,” he said. “The rate at which we’re providing staffing and service, they’ll never catch up.”
He said while having adequate staffing to handle every mental health call in the city would be great, San Antonio is still far from having designated units take even half of the calls. He said that would be a goal worth pursuing.
“Maybe we can’t handle them all, but we can certainly do a lot better job than we’re doing today,” Beach said.
