Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Domestic Violence topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
City briefing outlines San Antonio's cross-department domestic- and intimate-partner violence work
Summary
A city violence-prevention official reviewed San Antonio's 2019 strategic plan and cross-department programs addressing domestic violence, described shifts to a victim-centered public-health approach, and provided data on calls, reports and services.
Erica Hayler Stevenson, Violence Prevention Administrator at Metro Health, briefed the San Antonio Public Safety Committee on the city's coordinated approach to domestic violence, describing a shift from a law-enforcement-driven model to a victim-centered public-health model and summarizing recent data and service capacity.
"Interpersonal violence is part of what you've been charged with, and I'm gonna talk about a subset of that called intimate partner violence or domestic violence," Erica Hayler Stevenson said as she opened the presentation.
Why it matters: The presentation laid out how multiple city departments and partner agencies share responsibility for prevention, crisis response and long-term support for survivors. Committee members identified follow-up questions about emergency lodging, recidivism data for municipal-court diversion programs, youth-violence intersections and zip-code-level trends.
What the briefing covered: Stevenson listed nine city departments and the city manager's office as active in domestic-violence work and said the city adopted a strategic plan in 2019 to coordinate investment. Key points she presented:
- SAPD response: The San Antonio Police Department has expanded officers, detectives and sergeant positions since FY2020 through CRT grants and city funds, added overtime detective coverage for nights and weekends, and provides a volunteer Family Assistance Crisis Team and a Handle with Care notification process for children who witness violence.
- Training: SAPD requires 24 hours of family-violence training in the academy (compared with a stated statewide 12-hour requirement) and provides in-service updates every four years, Stevenson said.
- Data: Stevenson noted that domestic-violence calls and reports have remained relatively consistent across recent calendar years, and she highlighted family-violence homicides peaked at 30 in 2020 and were 22 in calendar year 2024.
- Metro Health services: Metro Health (victim advocate services moved to Metro Health in 2020) provides crisis advocates, case managers and a continuum of care including temporary lodging and home-security devices for survivors who cannot safely remain in their homes.
- City Attorney and municipal court: The City Attorney's prosecution division handles Class C misdemeanors related to domestic violence and offers a deferred-disposition standard offer for eligible offenders; municipal court runs a specialized domestic-violence docket and reported more than 1,100 assault filings in calendar year 2024, with 69% identified as family violence.
- Collaborative Commission on Domestic Violence: The CCDV, formed in 2019 and co-chaired by Maria Villal Gomez and Judge Monique Diaz, focuses on system-level improvements including data utilization, public communications and prevention programming in schools.
Questions and follow-up: Committee members asked how emergency lodging is allocated when shelters are full (Stevenson said city funds pay contracted hotel rooms for short-term stays), whether municipal-court diversion completions are tracked for recidivism (Stevenson said staff would follow up), and whether trends include youth-on-youth violence by ZIP code (Stevenson and staff said they would provide clarifying breakdowns).
Stevenson closed by noting activities planned for Domestic Violence Awareness Month, including an annual CCDV symposium on Oct. 3 and a forthcoming CCDV statistical report.
