City of San Antonio employees will soon be trained on how to identify and report elder abuse thanks to a collaborative effort to increase awareness of the underreported “crisis” gripping the community.
City Council’s Public Safety Committee greenlit the policy Tuesday, which directs the city’s Department of Human Services and Texas Adult Protective Services (APS) to develop training curricula for staff.
“You are going to be saving lives, literally, by [helping people be] able to identify these things and be able to train people on elder abuse and exploitation,” Judge Veronica Vasquez, who oversees Probate Court 2 in Bexar County, told the committee.
“There is definitely a crisis in Bexar County,” Vasquez told reporters after the meeting, and elder abuse is underreported across the country.
In 2023, Bexar County surpassed Harris County, which has more than twice the population, for the first time in the number of verified exploitation cases totaling 157, according to APS figures. There were more than 10,400 reports and nearly 7,000 investigations into elder abuse cases in Bexar County that year; nearly 16,500 and 11,800 respectively in Harris County.
And the older population is growing. In 2023, 13.3% of Bexar County’s population was over 65 compared to 11.2% in 2015.
“The baby boomers are aging [and] we’re just seeing more and more of these cases,” Vasquez said.
The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that one in 10 adults who are age 60 or older will experience elder abuse every year in the country. Elder abuse includes financial exploitation, neglect, abandonment as well as physical, psychological, and sexual abuse.
The new employee training policy, proposed by Councilwoman Melissa Cabello Havrda (D6) in December, will roll out first to departments that interact with the community most, including police, fire, health, human services, housing, parks and recreation as well as the City Attorney’s Office.
Animal Care Services, the public library system and code enforcement were added to this list of high-priority departments on Tuesday.
“If somebody is abusing animals, they might be abusing a person also that’s in their home or in their neighborhood,” Cabello Havrda said.
While state law mandates everyone to report elder abuse, people may not know that you don’t need to have hard evidence, Vasquez said. “If you see something, you’re required to say something. … Even if you don’t know, report it. Let them investigate and let them find out whether there is something there.”
The largest share of elderly abuse cases in Bexar County is reported by medical personnel, followed by relatives, community agencies and the victims themselves.
In 2022, a woman died in a local hospital after her three adult children allegedly neglected her hospice care. In 2018, a caretaker in San Antonio was charged with several felonies after police found an elderly, disabled woman was languishing in soiled clothes for months at a time.
Elder abuse is often underreported because people do not want to — or are unable to — report caregivers or members of their own families, Velasquez said. Memory and health issues often interfere with a person’s ability to ask for help.
The city’s training policy is the first mandate of its kind in Texas and the latest initiative that stems from the Elder Fraud and Exploitation Task Force that Vasquez co-founded with Texas Sen. Jose Menendez (D-26) in 2019. Cabello Havrda is a member of the task force and chairs the city’s Public Safety Committee.
Earlier this month, Bexar County approved an application for an $800,000 Violence Against Women Act federal grant that would establish a Senior Justice Assessment Center, a kind of one-stop-shop for older victims of crime.
“We are confident this federal funding opportunity will help close the gap in delivering support services and assistance to older adult women crime victims navigating their legal restitution,” Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai said in a statement. “A Senior Justice Assessment Center will provide case managers and establish a multidisciplinary initiative including law enforcement to ensure victims are not falling through the cracks.”
A similar center was established in Harris County in 2017, but the Bexar County center — at least for now — will involve hiring and training staff within multiple offices and courts, not a physical building like in Houston, Vasquez said.
The task force, with help from county grant writers, will also seek an $800,000 Victims of Crime Act federal grant to expand the Senior Justice Assessment Center’s services to all genders, she said.
“We’re hoping that we get one or both grants,” she said. “If we don’t get either one, we’ve talked to the city and the county, and they still are on board with creating some type of program.”
If the center is established, it’s possible that the task force could be dissolved.
“This is a community-wide problem, and there needs to be a permanent solution to this. … We’ll see,” Vasquez said. “My hope is that … it’s bigger than any one politician.”
If you think you or someone you know is being victimized, call the Adult Protective Services Hotline at 1-800-252-5400 or visit the Texas Abuse Hotline website. Call 911 for emergency situations.
