SAN ANTONIO — Bexar County approved its $2.8 billion budget Tuesday, and with it comes a significant boost for the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office.
"I think this budget is a budget that, you know, we try to tighten up, so to speak, on the spending, but we have not compromised public safety," said Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai.
County commissioners approved hiring 41 new positions for the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, a compromise from Sheriff Javier Salazar’s original ask of 60 positions.
“Coming in and you know, knowing full well what the budget process looks like,” he said. “It's usually paring away at what the wants are and, you know, getting it down to the bare minimum or what do you need for this year.”
Of the 41 positions, 24 new deputies will be hired for patrol in the upcoming fiscal year. The county hopes the 24 new added positions will assist in increasing response times for the sheriff’s office, in a new process backed by county commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores.
“What you have to do is geographically, you have to cut that big area into smaller, more manageable areas, put more deputies in there,” Sheriff Salazar said. “And that's exactly what these 24 new patrol positions are going to allow us to do is cut those bigger areas into more manageable pieces that can be more effectively patrolled and then get the appropriate number of deputies in there.”
Seven positions of the 41 will be added to the existing Fugitive Apprehension Unit (FAU), creating a new team dedicated to reducing violent crime in the county. The Sheriff’s Top Offender Program (STOP) unit will be a team of 18 who will be tasked with locating local fugitives that are not involved in organized crime.
“It'll be a unit comprised of uniformed contingents and plainclothes contingents with the sole purpose of going out and arresting violent fugitives,” the sheriff said. “It may be somebody that's out, that’s walking around with a felony warrant for some time. Or it may be somebody that committed a violent act last night.”
The STOP unit is a direct result of a string of violent repeat offenders committing violent crimes in August 2023. Several members of law enforcement were injured. The San Antonio Police Department at the time, criticized the Bexar County District Attorney’s office for allowing repeat offenders out of jail in the first place.
“It was an unfortunate debate of whose fault was that?” Judge Sakai said. “And one week, the mayor and I came together and created the public safety task force. We came up with over about over 30 action items, and this (STOP) unit was one of them.”
Both Bexar and San Antonio officials believe that a lot of violent crime is committed by a small number of people. In the past year, the San Antonio Police Department and the City of San Antonio have been executing the Violent Crime Reduction Plan. Sheriff Salazar calls the STOP unit, a more “proactive approach to tackling violent crime.”
“It'll be a lot of looking through online and open-source information,” he said. “Social media, things of that nature, looking at computer research, applying for warrants for things like cellular telephones if we need to. We're going to use, obviously, technology to our advantage to track down these people. But additionally, being that there's a plainclothes contingent to it, we’ll be open to utilize informants, anything at our disposal to try to generate more information on where these fugitives can be found.”
The sheriff explains that both the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office and the City of San Antonio collaborate to effectively reduce violent crime in the area. The goal is to ultimately keep citizens safe.
“What I can tell you definitively, without second guessing is that we do absolutely save lives just by the fact that if we've got more first responders out there,” Salazar said. “We're in the business of saving lives, and the commissioners court absolutely made that more possible.”
The fiscal year begins October 1, though the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office states that the Fugitive Apprehension Unit will be transitioning to create the STOP team immediately.