Over the last three weeks, for less than 10 hours per week, an armed police officer has been assigned to roam the stacks and grounds of the San Antonio Central Library as part of a pilot initiative aimed at increasing safety for staff and patrons.
“There is a trend up of assaults at the Central Library,” Kathy Donellan, assistant library director, told San Antonio Public Library Board of Trustees last month.
More than a dozen local residents and police reform activists who attended the board’s latest meeting Wednesday called for the library to stop the practice, arguing that the presence of an armed uniformed officer may intimidate marginalized communities.
The added security detail stemmed in part from an “unprovoked” incident earlier this year at the downtown library when a patron kicked a staff member in the face, San Antonio Public Library Director Ramiro Salazar told the San Antonio Report on Thursday.
The downtown library has successfully avoided the need for semi-regular police presence for many years, he added, but that assault and 17 others that occurred during fiscal year 2023 led library staff to look for possible solutions.
There were 12 assaults documented there in 2019, two in 2021, and 10 in 2022, Donellan said. However, the library was closed for renovations for portions of 2021 and 2022.
Of the 18 assaults in 2023; nine were committed by customers against security staff, four were against other library staff, and five were assaults involving two customers.
“We’re seeing a more recent pattern where it’s involving non-security staff,” such as librarians and librarian assistants, she said.
The library should be a welcoming, inclusive and safe space for everyone to enjoy, Salazar said. “We’re fully committed to that.”
The contracted security guards and those employed by the city who work at the library are not licensed peace officers and cannot legally detain an individual. In the case of the unprovoked attack, Salazar said, the assailant was able to leave before the police arrived.
“It’s my responsibility to protect our employees and our public,” he said. “I felt that we needed to explore — let me emphasize explore, not implement … a [policing] pilot.”
The added police assignment is expected to cost about $70,000 from the city’s fiscal year 2024 budget and last for up to six months.
Some urban libraries across the country have police, some don’t, Salazar noted, adding that he expected there to be some political pushback to the decision. “We hesitated, but I felt I needed to do something more to protect our employees. I could not live with my conscience if something more serious happened.”
When the program was presented to the library system’s board of trustees in October, they were supportive of the measure. Because the topic wasn’t on Wednesday’s meeting agenda, the board could not discuss it further after more than a dozen residents voiced their objection to the pilot program during the public comment portion of the meeting.
“The library is one of the last truly public and free spaces where people have access to a plethora of resources,” Ruby Jimenez, a member of the local chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, told the board told the board — likening the officer’s presence to the anxiety felt when being followed by an officer while driving. “By allowing police in these spaces, we’re adding a level of needless intimidation and quite literal violence to these spaces.”
She and several others who spoke suggested that the library hire a specialized social worker trained in de-escalation tactics instead of a police officer with a lethal weapon.
Other speakers pointed to recent cases in which SAPD officers shot and injured a teenager in his car and killed a woman experiencing a mental health crisis.
People of color and members of the LGBTQ community, who have been historically discriminated and harassed by police, might stop coming to the library, said Ananda Tomas, founder and director of police reform nonprofit ACT 4 SA. “You are going to continue to lose community partners and community members and library patrons if you continue to have armed officers here, which will affect the longevity and funding of the San Antonio Public Library system.”
The library will monitor any changes in visitors and resource usage that could be related to the policy, said Haley Holmes, public services administrator for the Central Library.
Holmes hasn’t heard any concerns from patrons in the building about the officer’s presence, but that could be because patrons don’t want to complain or they haven’t noticed. “Police are here often” responding to 911 calls, she said.
Central Library staff receive safety and security training, including de-escalation techniques, when they start working there, she said. “We do have more incidents than other locations and part of that is just the number of folks that come here.”
The library is on track to surpass 300,000 visits this year, according to a library spokesman. On average, Central’s visitation is about 10% of total visitation for the 30-location library system.
For a vast majority of the visits last year, there’s no incident, Donellan told the board last month, but “there were 500 incidents in [fiscal year 2023] at Central,” ranging from minor incidents like someone sleeping in the library, to serious assaults.
Staff at the library are trained to connect patrons with other city services such as housing, employment and health care assistance, Holmes said. Other city departments and partners — like the health department or the San Antonio Food Bank — regularly make presentations or host clinics inside the library, too.
“We bring social services in, but we don’t specifically have social workers,” she said.
But she’s looking into it.
“Libraries throughout the country have done programs with social workers,” Holmes said. ” I’ve done a lot of research because we’re constantly trying to figure out how we can make our services better and our library more welcoming and comfortable for everybody.”
Currently, one police officer is assigned to the Central Library on various days and times, spending between six and nine hours walking around the facility, she said, and “the police do not approach or get involved in situations” at the library unless they’re asked to by staff.
The pilot, if successful could last up to six months, she said. “We’re not going to wait until the end to do our evaluation. We’re taking into consideration all the feedback … we want to make sure that we’re responding to the positive and the negative and how can we adapt?”
It’s still too early to tell if the increased police presence has had a positive or negative impact, Salazar said. “You don’t make decisions by assumptions. You make decisions by looking at best practices and testing some ideas. And that’s what we’re doing right now.”
