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San Antonio is the first city in Texas to implement a program that replaces tickets and warnings for broken vehicle lights with vouchers to pay for the repair.
The San Antonio Police Department is partnering with Lights On!, a Minnesota-based program, to give drivers with broken lights vouchers of up to $250 to cover the repair’s cost at local participating auto shops.
Police Chief William McManus presented the program to the city’s Public Safety Committee in January. It’s meant to create positive community engagement with law enforcement and address a public safety issue.
“It is intended to improve community relations, to not fear the police, and help someone out financially when they’ve got to spend a little bit of money to get their car repaired,” McManus said.
The vouchers are funded by a $10,000 donation from H-E-B that was matched by MicroGrants, the parent organization of Lights On!. Sherman Patterson, the vice president of the program, said it has redeemed more than 8,600 vouchers since it began in 2017.
“From a socioeconomic standpoint — I'm sure [SAPD] officers have stopped people several times, the same person over and over again. They're making those hard choices. 'Cannot pay for this, have to pay for rent, have to pay for my car note, et cetera,'” Patterson said. “This can lead to loss of license, even jail time. It's just insurmountable.”
The program was founded after Philando Castile was shot and killed by a police officer in a Minneapolis metropolitan area during a traffic stop in 2016. Gregory Hudspeth, the president of the San Antonio Branch of the NAACP, said this program has financial and safety benefits.
“From the NAACP perspective, we want to ensure that we keep people alive, and we know as African-Americans [that] traffic stops can be deadly,” Hudspeth said. “And so our concern is to do the things that we could do and worked with organizations like this in which we can have programs out there so that … we are able to take care of that person.”
Nationwide, Lights On! works with more than 380 auto shops and more than 150 law enforcement agencies. According to the program’s 2020 survey data, one in five voucher recipients reported that they would have been unlikely or very unlikely to replace their lights without the voucher.
