San Antonio City Council members got a first look Monday at a draft of the community-wide Violence Prevention Strategic Plan that’s been nearly a year in the making.
The five-year plan focuses on four priority areas — youth-on-youth violence, gun violence, sexual violence and domestic violence — and uses a public health approach to tackle those issues rather than one that uses law enforcement alone.
One tactic outlined in the plan, for instance, calls for investment in “effective youth-supporting community organizations that provide mentoring services and evidence-based programs” such as Big Brothers Big Sisters to stem youth-on-youth violence.
The approach combines both upstream — meaning addressing a root cause or what led to violence — and downstream, or post-violence, interventions.
While the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District led the planning process, it’s intended to be a roadmap to guide the regional, collaborative effort to reduce violence.
“No one agency could do all of those things and what any one organization can do is not enough to move the needle community-wide — so it has to be done together,” said Erica Haller-Stevenson, a public health administrator at Metro Health.
The plan was developed by representatives from Metro Health, the San Antonio Police Department, UTSA and St. John Baptist Church, who collected input from dozens of nonprofits, governmental departments, faith leaders and residents who have lived experience with violence over the course of several months.
Haller-Stevenson said she is well aware of the fatigue some groups and individuals have when it comes to yet another ambitious plan. Metro Health has its own SA Forward Plan (2021) and the Collaborative Commission on Domestic Violence follows the city’s (2019) Domestic Violence Plan. SAPD has its own Violent Crime Reduction Plan.
This plan outlines much of the work that Metro Health’s violence prevention division will focus on over the next five years, updates the domestic violence plan and therefore the commission’s work and aims to align departments and agencies across the county toward a common goal, Haller-Stevenson said.
“Planning what you do … is a core part of public health,” she said. “It’s because we’re trying to figure out the best way to use our resources and … how what we’re doing leads to the intended outcome.”
The goals of the plan are to reduce rates of youth bullying, firearms and suicide as cause of death for youth and adults, as well as reducing the number of shootings, sexual assaults, intimate partner homicides and child fatalities related to abuse and neglect. The plan aims to increase public perception of community safety and social cohesion.
“If [people] have a high perception of community safety and social cohesion, that creates a feeling of safety and wellness and also contributes to them making their communities safer — so it creates a feedback loop,” Haller-Stevenson said. “Increasing social cohesion has a big impact on reducing property crime, too.”
Members of city council’s Public Safety Committee were supportive of the draft, which will be reviewed by the full City Council early next year. It will also be discussed as part of the city’s annual budget process.
“I will declare somewhat of a victory here,” said Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2), who was elected on a platform calling for a more holistic approach to public safety and crime prevention. “Crime at large is a public health issue that can only be met with a public health response.”
The plan does not put a price tag on how much it will cost to implement because it’s still unclear which agencies or nonprofits will take on which strategies in the plan, said Deputy City Manager Maria Villagómez, who also co-chairs the CCDV.
Metro Health, CCDV and partner organizations will take two to three months to review the plan and decide which tactics to take on, Villagómez said. “We’re probably going to have some gaps that we’re going to have to be identifying [if] we need to add more resources through the budget process or [seek] grants.”
Cities across the country continue to reexamine police policies and public safety tactics in response to local protests after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
San Antonio’s police services review started later that year and has led to a shift toward a public health approach to public safety and the establishment of specialized mental health teams.
“We started to talk about how we could, through Metro Health, have a different approach to public safety,” Villagómez said. “The police department could not do it all.”
