174. Twenty Years at SAPD: Chief Bill McManus on Recruiting, ICE, and Who Comes Next

Welcome to Big City, Small Town, the weekly podcast all about San Antonio and the people who make it go and grow. I'm your host, Bob Rivard. We couldn't do this podcast, now three years old and counting, without great support from our sponsors, Westin Urban Building, the city our children want to call home. Geekdom, the downtown space where entrepreneurs, innovators and builders connect and turn ideas into businesses. And swbc, the global financial services company based right here in San antonio that's celebrating 50 years of putting clients first. Our guest this week is San Antonio Police Chief William Bill McManus, who is coming to the end of 20 years as the Chief of Police here in San Antonio with his imminent Retirement scheduled for September 30, 2026. Chief McManus, welcome to Big City, Small Town. Thank you, Bob. I thought I'd been around a long time as a 47 year old journalist, but you have 51 years in law enforcement. I call people with 47 years on whatever they're doing rookies. That sets the tone for the next 45 minutes. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Doing great. First of all, are you going to stay in San Antonio? I am. Good. That's good news. So this has become home. Absolutely home. Yeah. My family wouldn't let me leave if I wanted to. Well, and you have three children in Texas now, adult children, all doing interesting and important things. So this really is home. And they all love it here. Let's talk a little bit about the last two decades. I said that you had been the police chief for 20 years because I've been around a long time. I probably am one of the few people that know. In 2014, you took a brief break, announced your retirement at the time after 40 years in law enforcement and became the director of the Senior Director of Security at CPS Energy at a time when we were first starting to. To talk about cybersecurity and some other related issues. But less than a year later, then City Manager Cheryl Scully hired you back. Yep, she did. That was a pretty unusual chapter in your career. Do you want to tell us about it? Yeah, it was. So the average tenure for a big city chief is anywhere three to five years. If you get past five years, you're doing pretty good. And I was pushing nine. I had already pushed nine. And I'm figuring that I'm pushing the odds, playing the odds here. Maybe being forced out for one reason or another. There's a political element to being. Yeah, there's a very political element to it. Whether you're in a strong mayor, city, or a manager, council, former government, which, of course, we are. Here I ran Into Doyle Benaby 2013 on Super Bowl Sunday. Doyle Benaby, as everyone may know, was the CEO for cps, a very visionary cpo, a real change agent and builder. Yeah, well, out of the blue, he asked. We met right by the meat counter. And out of the blue, he asked me if I'd be interested in coming over to cps. And I said, well, I could be. And at that point, I was having thoughts about nine years, what's going to happen? Even though everything was going well in the city for me, I was just worried about the odds. So he asked me if I was interested in that, and I said I could be. He said, okay, I'll have somebody from my staff call you after the holiday. I said, okay. Well, that never happened. And I never brought it up to him. I never. I think I ran into him a few times after that, but I never brought it up, nor did he. So, as fate may have it, 2014, I ran into him at Central Market on Super Bowl Sunday again, and he said the same thing. And I told him. I said, well, you brought this up a year ago. I didn't hear from you. He said, well, I have somebody call you. So we did. So we negotiated. You know, I really was hesitant about leaving, but we negotiated me leaving. And I believe I announced it in March. And when I mentioned it to Cheryl Scully, that's what we all want to hear, is how she reacted. I just had to scrape her off the ceiling because she went ballistic. She was not happy with me. And anyway, long story short, she talked to Doyle and they made arrangements for me to stay until January. So January 5th, I left and went over to CPS. And I had visions of me getting to know the business and promoting and making it a home there. Well, that didn't happen. I kind of had buyer's remorse not too long after I left, but I decided I was going to stick it out. So I started getting calls from recruiters, probably five months into it, to get you back into law enforcement. And I kept turning them down, saying, no, no, I'm good here, I'm good here. I'm going to stick this out. I'm going to make a career of this, a second career of this. And probably right around August, I guess it was, I got a call asking me if I was interested in the city of Tucson. I love Tucson. Matter of fact, that's where I went on my honeymoon. Really? Yeah. So I told them no. First call, got a second call from them, told them no again. And I was kind of kicking myself for turning it down. Well, they called the third time and I still remember the name of the recruiter. I've known her for a long time. And she called, take one more swipe at you, chief. Tucson. And I thought for about 10 seconds, I said, yeah. So between the time that I was going to go to Tucson and I had kind of started conversing with Cheryl, sometimes through Eric and sometimes directly with her. And then she asked me one day to meet her at the Tobin center with Mayor Ivy Taylor at the time. So I did, and we talked for about 45 seconds. And I put my suit on and my tie tightened my tie up. And after about 45 minutes, they invited me to come back to the city and got a unanimous vote in council to do that. And here I am today. It worked out great, didn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And I, I left CPS in almost nine months to the, to the day I left. And, and Paula Gold Williams was, I was reporting directly to her then be had left and I, I, I'll speak for her, but I think she was pretty sad to see me leave. A lot of change going on at CPS Energy. Yeah, for sure. Yesterday's news that Rudy Garcia's going to the Lower Colorado River Authority. Sure. Well, you have several months left in office, and rather than sort of ask you if you're a lame duck, I want to ask you about. And the answer to that would be no, but go ahead. I'm sure it isn't. And one of the things that you have on your plate is the spurs finals coming up. And I was talking to both a bike officer yesterday and also somebody that works on the west side, and they were both talking to me about Southwest military and whether, in their view, the reputation that San Antonio has for partying responsibly is no longer the case. And the officer told me that there were garbage fires set out in the street, that there was some gang violence, some fighting. Of course, we had the young man fall off the top of his vehicle or the top of a vehicle, and he's brain dead, which is a very sad, very sad thing for the family. But it just seems to me like maybe it's gotten out of hand and we're not even in the finals yet. What do you think about that? How do you even deal with, Basically, we all love the honking culture, but it's gridlocked downtown and it's worse in other parts of the city. I look back to when the spurs were a dynasty, when Parker and Ginobili and Duncan were the Big Three, and we were winning every other year. We were winning consecutive years, even we were winning championships. And I would actually go down to Southwest Military working and watch the celebration. And it was very. I wouldn't say it was tame, but there wasn't a whole lot of dangerous stuff going on. But the worst thing I saw down there was the cars had to go through somewhat of a gauntlet, if you want to call it that. And there were people on either side of the car and they'd rock the car for a minute or two and then they let it go. But it was all in good fun. The people in the cars were actually getting in line to get their cars rocked. And that was about the extent of it. But as you mentioned, there is a lot of dangerous stuff going on down there. These past few wins we've had. And matter of fact, I interviewed with woai this morning about the upcoming finals and what to expect as far as the celebrations go. And we've got a little bit of a plan in place to that we hope will tame that down. Same thing downtown on Commerce, but. And what I told WOAI was, you know, we want everybody to come down and celebrate. This is San Antonio. That's what we do. We want everybody to do it safely and responsibly. And once, once we get on the other side of that, where we start looking at assaultive behavior, dangerous behavior, property destruction, that sort of thing, that's where we're going to have to step in. I wonder, you know, you talk about it used to be tamer and now that's a change. The city's about 25% bigger now than it was when you took the job. And I just wonder how much that's changed. And I have a lot of questions for you that usually are kind of questions that only come up when people are talking about the police contract and collective bargaining. But I just wonder, would you explain to me what, what you think a growing city like San Antonio needs to do in terms of anticipating how many police that we need for a city? Are there some formulas or some sort of measures that are universally accepted? And in my police chief opinion, when a city grows like we do, the department has to expand with it. If you don't, if we don't, you know, you start looking at increases in response times, you start looking at decreases in visibility out there. And I don't remember how many budgets ago it was, but, you know, we did a Survey. And the biggest thing people wanted to see was police, more police visibility. It's an issue on council right now as we look to the fiscal 2027 budget and what your thoughts are about that. So a few years back we did a, a staffing study because always, you know, you get questions, well, Chief, how many police officers do we need? And you know, I mean, I can pull a number out of the air. It's not a evidence based or study based answer. This was actually the result of Clayton Perry's former councilman for District 10. Yeah, constantly saying, well, how many police officers do you need? Do you need more police officers? Do you need more police officers? So we did this study and the first half of the study recommended that we increased patrol only by 360 officers. So where did that 360 number come from? Well, the study showed that officers spend 60% of their time on call. Right. 40% of their time off call, discretionary time. That's the time they can do directed patrol, do traffic, those sorts of things. Look out for things in neighborhoods that the neighborhood association or homeowners association are concerned about. So they have 40% of their time to do that. What this study showed was that we should reverse that. We should have 60% of our time off call to do direct patrol, crime control, whatever you want to call it, and 40% of our time on call. So the number to reach that ratio was 360. At the time we were 4060. And the numbers that we have hired since then, we were about, I want to say 50, 50 ish. Somewhere right around there. I haven't looked at it lately, but. And then beyond that, they were incre. He was recommending an increase in investigative personnel as well to reduce caseload for investigators. Since the new council is in, there's debate whether or not they even want to honor that study. So that's kind of where we are now. There's a back and forth and all that. And again, it's up to council to decide what they want to do. One of the challenges of San Antonio is not just the growth in population, but we have one of the largest geographic footprints along with Houston and Los Angeles. We're a sprawling city. So that's a lot of substations for police and fire and it's a lot of miles to cover. And fortunately for us, we've built one new substation, kind of a mini substation downtown on North St. Mary's and there's one now. We broke ground on the south side, southeast side. We broke Ground five, six months ago. And that will be a state of the art facility for our police officers. The other policing issue, I think that wasn't that big of a deal when you started, and it's become a very big deal here and everywhere else is immigration. We had Senate Bill 4 passed in 2017, which attacked San Antonio and other cities as being so called sanctuary cities, which very few of us agree that we were ever a sanctuary city, but maybe we were a humane city. You've consistently said over the years, you know, city police are not federal immigration officers and that the two missions are distinctly different. But there was also enormous pressure from both the state and to a lesser degree from Washington for cities to at least rhetorically demonstrate their commitment to the administration's pretty harsh immigration policies. How has that changed your job and everybody at the force? And how are you navigating that kind of balance? You know, it really hasn't. You know, we were not. There was. There was never. Even before. Before s. Before, there was never an issue with police officers running around asking people for their immigration status? Never happened. We just didn't do it. There wasn't anything in writing. We just didn't do it. One of the things that when everybody's pushing local law enforcement to enforce immigration laws, we don't have that jurisdiction. It's a federal, you know, when's the last time you ever heard of local police officer, local law enforcement serving a warrant for federal tax evasion? We don't do it. We don't run around making arrests or getting involved in federal offenses unless it's also a state offense like bank robbery. That's a federal offense as well as a state offense. So we obviously get involved in that, but we never had the jurisdiction to do that. With SB4, as everyone knows, or I guess everybody knows, there have been multiple challenges to that law. And most recently the courts lifted a provision that was holding up part of the bill. Well, Senate Bill 4, that was passed in the most recent legislative session. It's also an anti immigration bill that deals mostly with the border. I don't think that really crosses. And actually at least the law affects us, even though it may not affect us in practice because we are two and a half hours from the border. But nonetheless, officers still now have the ability legally to, if they have probable cause to understand that someone has just crossed the border illegally, they have the authority to make that arrest. Now, how you come to that probable cause to be able to make that arrest and you can't substitute skin color, accent, inability to speak English for probable cause to make an arrest. So the law as it stands now, which, which just changed last Friday, it allows officers to make arrests for illegally crossing the border at a point of entry that's not a port of entry. So that's what we're looking at now. Matter of fact, we're getting ready to put something out to the department which explains those changes. But we're not a point of entry, Chief, are we? No, we're not. I'll give you an example. If an officer stopped a vehicle with, you know, half a dozen people in it, and the driver. Well, I don't have a license. So where are you coming from? Well, to be honest, I'm coming from the border and I pick these folks up somewhere where they were being smuggled in. That's probable cause to make an arrest. But, you know, how often is that going to happen? Well, it's interesting because you talk about not targeting people based on their language, facilities or the color of their skin or anything, but that's exactly what ICE federal officers have been doing all over the country. And I wonder how you're getting along with them here. There's quite a bit of speculation here about them acquiring a major warehouse and wanting to literally warehouse people under detention out on i35. And a lot in our audience may not know this, Chief, but you came here from Minneapolis, where you were police chief 20 years ago, and you obviously had to be watching everything unfold there over the last half year. You might not have addressed that before, but now that you're retiring, I wonder if you can share some candidates thoughts about what it was like to watch that in Minneapolis and what your thoughts are about how we're doing here. So SB4 requires local law enforcement to cooperate with federal authorities, HSI. So we are required to cooperate. Now, what's the definition of cooperation? If they ask us to do something, which they have, but not frequently, then we are bound by SB4 to cooperate. If you remember back in 2017, the 12 immigrants in the back of a trailer over on Splashtown off 35. Yeah. Terrible situation. That whole scene over there resulted in a lawsuit that was settled not too, too long ago against me and the city. The AG filed a lawsuit against the city, filed two lawsuits against me, and again, that was settled, I want to say, probably a year, two years ago. How was that settled? The city paid $300,000. No admission of guilt. What was the money for? Just a settlement. Settle it. Get us out of it. So what is the current status between SAPD and Homeland Security? In San Antonio and how you're operating or how they're operating. We met with them when the laws started to change and we said, look, the law requires us to cooperate with federal authorities and we will cooperate with you. And we left it at that. There hasn't been that much activity between us and ice, but again, we're required to do that by law. And again, we had just gotten out of a five year lawsuit for being accused of not cooperating. So we haven't had the kind of activity that we saw in Minneapolis. But I wonder, as that was unfolding, did you confer with your senior staff and come up with a sort of how are we going to respond if that kind of situation develops here? The answer is always the same. We have to cooperate by law with federal authority. So when I'm asked, you know, what are you going to do, Chief? I say, well, we're going to follow the law. And that's the short, easy answer to that question. We're going to follow the law. We have no choice. That is a very different world than the one that you came into in law enforcement. And even that existed in San Antonio 20 years ago. And President Trump has three more years in office. So your successor will probably ultimately have to deal with that issue maybe in a more direct way than you've had to. Well, I mean, I don't believe that my successor will have to deal with it in any other way other than follow the law. But we haven't. I'm saying it, it appears that ICE will be a more active presence in San Antonio in the coming years if they build that warehouse facility. I suspect, I mean, if you speculation, but possibly in an era where suddenly it's considered criminal to talk about dei, whether you think your successor should come from inside the department or I know a national search has already been launched, but do you consider it a strength of any department or organization when they can promote from within? And have you been, for lack of a better word, grooming possible successors in your time as chief? There are probably a handful of people who will apply. I believe that from inside, I believe that there will be a lot of applicants put in for this job. It all depends what the council's looking for. I mean, the way it works is a search firm will poll citizen groups, neighborhood associations, HOAs, council members. Some of the community outreach is already underway. Yes, it is. And so once they find what, you know, kind of a good synopsis of what everybody's looking for, then they'll put that into a brochure and they'll send that out for people to apply. And again, I believe that there will be a lot of people applying here because it is such a great city to be in, live in, work in. Do you think it's important to have a bilingual, bicultural, Hispanic police chief in a Hispanic majority city? I think it's valuable and necessary to have someone who's culturally aware. I'm not going to drill down into whether they should be bilingual or be a certain ethnicity, but I think that absolutely they should be culturally aware of where they are. And you know how we live here. Sometimes presidents and others leave letters for their successors behind. Do you have any words of wisdom for whoever takes over from you? You know, I think one of the biggest attributes you can have as a chief is to be humble, be a good communicator, listen to your command staff. If you come in here as a police chief and you try to run the department by edict, you know you're going to fail. I think that your command staff has to play a very, very big role in decision making. It can't be all you as chief. And there's a saying that my son's grammar school, San Antonio Academy had and still does. And it's so simple, but it is so to the point. Be honest, be kind, be the best you can be. Those are the words of John Webster, the long John Webster there. That's right. Wonderful man. And if you know, I mean, I tell that to my officers, the cadets, when I go to speak to them. Be honest, be kind, be the best you can be. And I say that at graduation, when they graduate from the academy. Again, it's just so important for a chief to be humble and be honest, be kind and be the best they can be. How do people that are coming into the academy or graduating from the academy, how does that going compared to 10, 20, 30 years ago? Policing has changed a lot. I'd be curious, given your past and you've worked in D.C. washington D.C. you've worked in Dayton, you worked in Minneapolis. How do you rank us as a city in terms of police civilian relations? And we all went through black Lives matters several years ago, just before the pandemic. There was a lot of defund the police rhetoric around the country here and elsewhere. We seem to have swung back away from that now. Although you still see some of that tension on the current city council, in my opinion. So is it a good time to become a police officer? Are you recruiting well or is it an issue? I'm speaking today to you from an UNBIASED position. So I can be completely honest about everything that we're talking about. We have had the greatest fortune in our recruitment efforts. We fill as many people as we want to put in the academy class. That's how many we put in because we have the applicants. That's a different message than I'm hearing from some of the union leadership. No, I'm not sure who you're talking with, but I mean, I can show you the numbers. If we want to put 70 in, we put 70 in. If we want to put 50 in, we put 50 in. But we haven't had any issues recruiting and filling academy classes. Now, if we have a year where we're going to do a fiscal year where we're going to do five classes, no calendar year actually, then we'll have fewer than if we're going to do four classes because we can't accommodate that capacity or it's very difficult to accommodate that capacity because when they graduate, they've got to find ftos for them. What does that stand for? Field Training Officer? Well, we have no problem filling academy classes and we have departments around the country that would. That would envy your. Envy our current situation with recruiting and we have not had. We got into a bind a few years ago because of the budget. We didn't have any academy classes for a stretch of time. And we got way behind in trying to catch up. We caught up some time ago and we are very, very fortunate in the departments in Dayton. The Dayton department was much smaller than here, as was Minneapolis. I don't know that we really had any problems recruiting back then. I know that council back in Dayton when I was there was cutting. So we weren't putting as many through the academy as we. As we had been. Minneapolis, they were cutting as well. What's your current for uniform personnel? What's your current number? It's just over 3,000. Okay. And it just seems to me that just through retirements and attrition, you would have to have a couple of hundred people come out of the academy every year to stay even. You're right. And we, and we typically are not even when we have an academy class just go in. We're typically over hired because the cadets are counted in our budgeted strength. But as far like boots on the ground, you know, we have a number of vacancies there. But as the academy classes graduate, you know, they get filled. And our attrition is not. When we were going through the Black Lives Matter era, you know, our attrition was very, very high. And now it's probably down to a minimum. Did you lose anybody to federal recruitment efforts when they were paying huge$50,000 bonuses to people to sign up for ICE or. No, no. Every now and then we might have somebody leave for another department, but it's not en masse, okay? It's single numbers. Well, when you look back over your 20 years here, what are the highlights and what are the lowlights? I was anticipating a question. You know, what's one of the big. What's the best thing you can point to? I can't point to any one best thing. Bicycle patrol is pretty cool. Yeah, I'm a big advocate of that, and it didn't exist before. Well, I know you're a bike rider, so I. But. But I don't ride on the sidewalks like some cops. But, you know, I, I keep it legal. This whole 20 year journey for me has just been fantastic. It has been the honor of my professional career to wear this uniform and to serve with these men and women here in the department. You have a new public safety headquarters that didn't exist before your time. That was pretty cool. But I mean, that's a material thing. You know, the things that I look at are the relationships with the community, the caliber of officers that we have in the department. We've got a smart and talented police department. Aside from being police officers, have you ever heard our choir sing? I have heard your choir. I get chill. It's been probably 13 years ago since I said, let's start a choir. And you have a rock band too, at least. Well, we had. Yeah, we had. Used to play at the marathon every year. Yeah, they're still out there, but they're not a full time band anymore. But the. I still get chills when I hear the choir sing. They've performed at the. Most recently at the National Police memorial week in D.C. on the Capitol, and then once at the Monument. But we just have a fantastic department. And it's, in my opinion, second to none. When I speak to cadets when they're graduating and their families, I tell them that we have, in my opinion, not just because I'm chief or member of the department, that we have the best police department in the country. And I said, why do I say that? People look at New York, L.A. chicago as being the best police departments. Well, that's because they have a TV show and, you know, everybody sees them in their best. And we don't have a TV show, although we could have, because I've gotten. I've gotten requests to do cops and Some other cop TV shows. You took a pass on that? I took a pass on it, yeah. I don't like those shows. I think that it puts officers in a bad light often enough. They play up to the cameras, and I don't want our folks being put in that position. But I tell them that what makes a great police department is not just because the chief is a member of it. He says it is. It starts out with recruiting. We've got great recruiters and applicant processors who get the job done. The work that goes into that, you wouldn't believe how tedious and voluminous is the paperwork to get the, you know, somebody qualified to get through the academy. It's really important to keep certain personalities out of and off the police force that might want on there for their. They go through a rigorous recruiting process, and then you have training. We have one of the best academies in the. In the country. I don't know if you've ever been over there. I have been, yeah. But we've got great instructors. We've got. So once you get past the academy, You've got our FTOs, our field training officers continue the training. They do a great job. Our supervisors, they do a great job. Our policies put us in place to make sure that we have an orderly and disciplined department. Not punitively disciplined, but disciplined in what they do. The investigators, I mean, they do a great job. We have very smart, very, very talented investigators. And then going back to the heart of the police department, your patrol officers, they do a fantastic job on the street. Response times are great. I had a chief from Houston where I was talking to him a couple chiefs ago, and he asked me what our response times were, emergency response times were. And I told him, you know, five minutes and some odd seconds. He goes, are you kidding me? How do you get it down to that far? I think theirs was at the time, like 13 or 14 minutes. And so, you know, we've got chiefs in other parts of the country that look at us. We had at one point a couple years ago, we had Phoenix Police Department visit us with their deputy or assistant city managers and their executive police staff, asking us how we do this, how we do this, that. And that's not the only department that we had do that. We had others come in here and ask us how we do things. So we, in my opinion, based on all the things that I just mentioned, are the best, if not one of the best, police departments in the country. Any regrets about what you didn't get done? I think you made a lot of progress on getting people out of patrol cars and in the neighborhoods. I'm not sure whether or not the rank and file share that philosophy or if they buy into it, but it does seem like we've tried over your 20 year tenure to put more police into the neighborhoods and be part of the social fabric than people just responding to 911 calls. And we've done that. As a matter of fact, we have an immersion program in the academy that puts cadets in neighborhoods for a specific amount of time. And then when they go out on their. On their rides with their FTOs, they're exposed to all different types of neighborhoods then as well. You know, there's so many things that we've accomplished in 20 years, substantive things. And I'll go back to 2006. I think it was one of the most significant changes that we made in the department. Police departments in Texas never used to walk warrants. What does it mean, walking a warrant? So walking a warrant means if I see a crime committed in front of me, but. And I can't catch the guy, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna take a. Do an affidavit and go get it signed by a. By a judge and then take it to the da. So once you have a warrant, I can go out and arrest the guy. Right. But warrants were never walked for family violence. And the way, the way I got onto that was I was at my desk one morning reading the reports from the night before, and there was a family violence assault where I know it was a estranged husband or husband, but he assaulted his significant other and beat her so bad, she lost use of her mid. Her paraplegic. He beat her so bad. So I read the report, but I didn't see anything in it where an arrest was made or a warrant was made was applied for. So I called the assistant chief from down the hall, and I said, hey, why didn't we apply for a warrant for this case? And the answer was, well, we don't. We don't apply for warrants. We walk them. So we'll. So we'll. We'll fill out all the paperwork and, and take it over to the DA's office and drop it on the desk at the intake. And then when they get around to it, they'll decide what they want to do with it. It goes into the inbox. Meanwhile, this guy's still out there, and the victim. Survivor is now in danger. So I said, well, we need to. We need to fix that. So I called Houston Charlie McClellan. I think was the chief there at that time? And I say, charlie, you guys walk warrants for. No, no, we file them at large. So I called Susan Reed, and after a bunch of. District attorney. Yeah, so after a bunch of conversations internally and with the district attorney's office, we changed it to where we now walk once our policy has changed. You walk a warrant if the suspect isn't there. We never used to look for the suspect. If he left the scene, we just go fill out the paperwork. But now you have to exhaust all leads when you're looking for the person. So that was a significant change that we made here in the department. Other significant change we. We changed our policy when it comes to pursuits, vehicle pursuits. So it's got to be a violent crime or a misdemeanor involving a firearm for us to pursue. A lot of folks don't like that. They want us to chase people. But a life is not worth somebody catching somebody for running a red light. It's dangerous and it's very dangerous. It is very, very dangerous to do that. But we've made many, many significant changes in 20 years. Matter of fact, I got some folks putting that all together for me so we can show what we've done in 20 years in terms of significant change. Well, as I look at what some of our issues are in the city, and this may be the old guy speaking here a little bit, but we have a terrible drunk driving record relative to other cities in the state and just about anywhere. We do have a very high incidence of domestic abuse, mostly men on women and I think increasingly on our highways, the incidents of either road rage or what I would call highly irresponsible driving of people zipping in and out of lanes, putting other people at risk. That all of that's become a lot worse in the, let's say, the 30 or 40 years I've lived in this city. And you could almost have sapd on all of those highways full time. Just tracking all of. All of that. Fiesta is probably the biggest drinking episode or time of the year here. What are your thoughts about those sort of trends in our city and where we're. We have a DWI unit that works overnight and make a lot of arrests. You know, we. We put stuff out on social media about how dangerous it is to drink and drive. My message to the public every time I have the opportunity is, even if you have one drink, don't get behind the wheel. It's not worth it. Because if you get stopped and you smell like alcohol, it doesn't matter if you have one beer or 10 beers, you're going to get out of the car, you're going to do SFSTs, you know, the SFT, the sobriety field sobriety test. Okay. You're going to wind up doing that if you are. I'm not sure I can balance on one leg anymore. Even when I'm. I try it every now and then just to keep practice. Not that I need to do that. These are all behavioral issues. And I think that the mindset for people who decide they're still going to drink and drive is it's not going to happen to me. I can either. I know when I've had too much to drink and it's not going to happen to me, but inevitably, at some point, it's going to. And that message is sent loud and clear during the holidays and during fiesta. And I'll say it right now again, you know, if you're going to drink, it's not worth it. As far as road rage goes, you know, how do you control people's tempers when you have no control over them? Especially now that it seems like there's a gun under the front seat of every pickup truck. You better believe it. And the thing that I tell my kids, don't ever blow your horn at somebody or give them the finger. And, yeah, don't react to anything anybody does. Don't look like you're exasperated because they're waiting too long to go after. You know, when the light changes green. And don't make eye contact with anybody. It's, you know, because you just never know. It's kind of a shame that you have to give that kind of advice to family members. But. But it's a reality. It is. Is one DWI unit enough for a city our size, or should you have a half a dozen of those out deployed every night? We have one unit, but we have a bunch of officers in that unit. And, I mean, they're out there making plenty of arrests. You know, unfortunately, our numbers don't go down. And, you know, oftentimes after. After an event, fiesta, you know, the first thing we do is look at how many DWI arrests we had. I heard there were a lot in the drunk tank after the spurs last win. I didn't follow that, but I wouldn't surprise you. Yeah. Yeah. I was asking myself as. As I was thinking about our interview. What. What must be the hardest thing about the work that you've done? And it has to be fallen officers and dealing with the loved ones that are left behind. You hit it exactly when the head. It's, it's. Matter of fact, I mentioned that in that speech I gave at the Memorial wall and you were just at a funeral for a police officer that committed suicide. I think the most difficult. You probably get this from most officers, if you asked, dealing crime scenes and violent crime scenes that involve children. And, and this has been, that's been true in all the police departments I've been in. I, I don't think I could count the number of violent crime scenes I've been on since I've been on. And as a patrol officer, as a detective and as a supervisor and on up the ranks. But, yeah, I've always admired the fact as a chief that you show up. Yeah. But regardless of the hour or wherever. Yeah. Dealing with explaining to family members of officers who have been killed in line of duty what happened and helping them through the ordeal, especially in the initial stages of it. And the same thing, having to give a death notification to somebody whose son or daughter, husband or wife was killed in a car accident or killed in some street shooting. Do you have ways of dealing with that for people? I mean, you hear about police officers suffering extreme mental stress and trauma over kind of PTSD issues and I just. Officers going home and committing domestic violence themselves or it seems like the media, every time somebody in uniform gets a dwi, that's automatic front page. Well, these days, any discipline at all resulting in a suspension, it's front page. We have, I want to say, more than adequate resources for officers who are having trouble with the PTSD related issues or an event that they were involved in on the street, whether they were witness to it or part of it. We have a core of, I'll say, corps of psychologists that are available to the officers. We have peer support groups. We have our mental health officers who are there to assist as well. We have a unit that deals with nothing but officer support. Matter of fact, I saw her this morning at the funeral. Sergeant Tina Barron does a great job at it and she is very, very knowledgeable of how to manage and deal with officers who are having trouble coping for one reason or another. We upped that game, if I can say that, back several years ago when we had a number of active officer and retired officer suicides. So we increased our efforts in providing resources to deal with, to help officers deal with that. You mentioned mental health officers. I think that ought to be one of the principal achievements of your time here, that those units were created. And that lets me bring up the last subject before we bring this to a close. Which is how do you police the homeless situation? And it's interesting that we're a city that probably devotes more resources than any other city I know of between the Haven for Hope and all of the other organizations that are working on that front. But it's not a problem to be solved. It's more of a condition that's in every city all the time. I think the mental health units are very visible downtown. I've seen them working a lot. And yet when you look at public surveys, people put homelessness at the top of almost every survey of their concern. And I wonder how you reconcile that. It's a concern and an issue that we have throughout the whole city, not just downtown. You know, we changed the way dramatically the way we deal with the homeless. It used to be years ago the homeless would run when they saw us coming because we were going to break up their encampment and throw them in jail for the night. We weren't going to offer them any services. And now the city itself has upped its game in dealing with the homeless situation as well as the police department. But we get on the scene now, if we get a complaint or if we see it an encampment growing, then we'll go in to abate it. And we give them X number of days to hours to leave and pack up and try to find somewhere else to go get help. We offer services and if they want to go to the Haven or if they want to go to some other facility that can assist them, we'll take them there, we'll take their pets, we'll take their property. Most times they're not going to take us up on it. So we just clear them out and move them on again. If they need services, we provided for them. But most of them don't care for that. I liked your, your description of the homeless condition as opposed to a homeless problem. It is a condition. I don't know what the solution for it is. The city has spent, spends millions of dollars trying to provide services and help for the homeless. But we talk about low barrier shelters, renting hotels, doing all these things that or intended to get them off the street. But you could offer some homeless folks a five star hotel and they wouldn't stay in it. You're looking at folks who have addiction issues, they have mental health issues or a combination of both. And how you, I guess if you had the solution to addressing those issues, you'd probably be great demand, you know, around the country to help solve the issue. But unfortunately that's something that you can't arrest it away. There are no laws against being homeless in and of itself, but there are laws that still are enforced for trespassing and using drugs and that sort of thing. The majority of people who are homeless, whether it's a woman with children who's been a victim of domestic abuse or somebody that's in a financial crisis, they do avail themselves of the services and they are helped on their way into a better tomorrow. But that hardcore, maybe 1,000 people or even less that we have of people that are drug addicted or off their meds and mentally ill, those are the street people that everyone sees and that define the public debate. Just moving over a nudge, you know, back to family violence. You know, we've got great advocacy here in San Antonio for family violence victims. You know, Martha Palais, she's the CEO of the Family Violence Prevention Services. Matter of fact, I'm on her board. But she's got a great facility to help women who want to get out of their situation. I mean, it's probably the best thing in the city for women who are victims of family violence, for them to get into that. It used to be called the battered women's shelter, now has a different name, but she's been doing great work for decades. Well, Chief, we're. We're about out of time, so I have to thank you for 20 years of service. You're going to be a hard act to follow in my opinion and, well, thank you. I think I probably speak for our audience when I do say thank you for all those years of public service here in San Antonio. We're glad you're not leaving. It's. It's been my honor, in all honesty and sincerity, it's been my honor to be here and my honor to wear this uniform. So congratulations. Thanks, Bob. All right, y'. 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