Roughly a year after a string of highly publicized shootings involving suspects with violent criminal records who were out on bail or parole, local leaders are still struggling to close gaps in the criminal justice system — gaps identified as problematic by their working group.
The City of San Antonio and Bexar County released a community-wide Public Safety Action Plan in January aimed at reducing violent offenses committed by people who have previously committed crimes.
The move came as Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales was also launching a plan to speed through a backlog of roughly 6,000 felony cases. While that program experienced some early success, its progress has slowed dramatically, even as attorneys continue to pick up additional cases for overtime pay.
Speaking to county commissioners Tuesday, Gonzales said his office had experienced a 41% increase in indictments within the program’s first five months.
But from June to November this year, indictments actually decreased 10% from that same span in the previous year, Gonzales said in a presentation.
“If we saw the high-risk backlog as a problem before, it still exists,” Commissioner Grant Moody (Pct. 3) said of the program at the Commissioners Court meeting Tuesday. “It’s actually increased a little bit from where it was 12 months ago.”
Gonzales chalked up the problems to the rocky rollout of a new record-keeping system, Odyssey, that was designed to help facilitate information-sharing between government agencies. He also blamed an increase in digital evidence that attorneys have to review, and a backlog at the county’s crime lab.
“Primarily, [it’s the drug] cases that we are seeing that are causing some challenges in our office,” Gonzales said.
His office also continues to deal with persistent staffing shortages, despite recent salary bumps approved by the county to help address it. Since October of 2023, we’ve averaged about 21 lawyers down or vacancies per month, Gonzales said.
“I think where we’re at is, some progress had been made, and then there were some factors — some in our control, some factors maybe outside of our control — that negatively impacted that, to where we’re actually worse off than we were 12 months ago,” Moody said.
Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai, who convened the city and county leaders for the initial public safety plan, sounded sympathetic to those concerns, and the county voted unanimously to continue funding Gonzales’ backlog program.
But Sakai said the public would have to be patient with addressing gaps in the system that turned up in their initial review of the problems a year ago.
In particular, he said the county’s ongoing technology upgrades should be viewed as infrastructure projects just like roads and bridges: Painful during the implementation, but beneficial once they’re up and running.
“The issue is complex,” Sakai said. “It’s not just Odyssey, it’s just not IT, it’s not just the DA, or SAPD or the Bexar County Sheriff… It’s digital evidence. It’s evidence transfer. It’s backlogs with other stakeholders.”
“For now, we’ve got to deal with the fact that everybody’s working as hard as they can.”
