What does public safety look like in a fast-growing city like San Antonio?
Councilmember Sukh Kaur, now in her second term for District 1, was recently tapped to chair the city’s Public Safety Committee. She says the answer is a mix of enforcement and prevention.
Kaur has made public safety one of her priorities alongside infrastructure, housing and support for small businesses.
Having served on the committee during her last term, she praised former District 6 Councilmember Melissa Cabello Havrda for her work as the previous chair.
“If I do half as good a job as she did, that’ll be awesome, because she did an incredible job serving as the chair of this committee,” Kaur said.
With a passion for education and economic development, Kaur says her approach to public safety will be guided by data and collaboration.
She spoke with the San Antonio Report about her priorities for the committee, the concerns she’s hearing and how she hopes to strengthen trust between the community and law enforcement.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What do you see as your top priority as Public Safety Committee chair?
I think one of the things as a base is getting our community to understand what our police and fire department do. That education component I love. As part of policy priorities, the areas of public safety that we have heard a significant amount of from district one, also in District 7, and some of our neighboring districts are our straight and loose dog population and aggressive dogs. So working with Animal Care Services to continue to support the work that they are doing towards their strategic plan, how can we amplify areas that they haven’t necessarily that they need support in.
For example, this past year, we led a pilot to provide fencing for folks to prevent dogs or animals from getting out. And in addition, we also gave out dog houses and dog food to members of a community that allowed ACS to go door to door and build relationships with residents. In that effort, we were able to identify over 100 homes that had pets that still needed to be spayed and neutered, we were able to get out microchips and that provides us with a long term solution for this problem. That’s one thing we want to focus on, is long term solutions for our ACS challenges.
The second we will focus on how we support SAPD in all of the upcoming changes that are going to be happening, of course, their contract will be negotiated next spring, and one of the things we’ve heard a lot from residents is enforcement.
Enforcement for things like 18-wheeler illegal parking and parking in general, in and around downtown or in business areas that are close to neighborhoods. In addition, the other thing that comes up a lot is speeding through residential neighborhoods. And quite frankly, SAPD just doesn’t have the capacity to do that.
So looking at innovative solutions to help address those and then, along with supporting our SAFFE Officer Program, it has had a lot of success, so we want to figure out exactly what we can do to help support them as another priority.
The last area of focus is our fire department. It’s doing really well, we’re going to be funding a squad and additional squad members for them this budget cycle. In particular looking at our unhoused population, and how we can best help support them, working with our teams to help figure out what are the best ways that we can support our community and ensuring that they find the housing and mental health support that they need.
In the proposed budget discussion there’s currently debate about the funding for 40 additional patrol officers. How do you plan on addressing the police and fire recruitment and retention issues?
That’s something we’re going to have to work with the police leadership on and work with the deputy city manager Maria to truly figure out where the gaps are and what strategies we can best take on for recruitment and retention.
What is the actual cost of recruiting a new officer versus retaining one and making sure that we’re keeping the right policies in place so we do not duplicate those costs.
How do you plan to balance the need for enforcement with investment in prevention like mental health, the unhoused and animal care services?
Public safety has to be a combination of prevention and enforcement. I think often we get into this battle of how much and which one gets more and you know, we’ve been working a lot with UTSA to do more data based efforts, and I think we need to continue that, really using best practices and data to drive our decision making. We have to equally focus on both prevention and enforcement because both of those go hand in hand in all of our departments.
Whether it’s animal care services, where we have to prevent, to really address our stray and loose dog and aggressive dog population. We have to work on prevention with more spay and neuter surgeries and more education one on one. We also have to increase our fines for folks that are letting their dog roam loose and making sure we have enough to speak in the accountability metric if there are violations.
So it has to be a both and solution, so we’re not over penalizing certain subgroups, which is what happens a lot with public safety.
How do you see the committee’s role in fostering trust and transparency between the community and law enforcement?
This is an important role that we could take on in some of the conversations, particularly with the LGBTQIA community. In the last several months, they brought us some ideas on ways that we could truly, from a public safety standpoint, do some more community engagement and educational awareness opportunities and running education campaigns regarding safe practices, you know, ways to ensure that you’re not putting yourself in harm’s way, particularly for that community that, right now, is being targeted.
So I think there are creative ways that we can help to continue to build that trust, I would say overall, San Antonio in general, is not similar to some of the other cities we’re seeing around the country with distrust.
But of course, there’s a lot more that we can do to help build stronger trust, and acknowledging that and having innovative ways to create more educational opportunities is a great way to do it.
Just last week, the SAFFE officers were honored at council for what they were doing in the community, and I think that’s what we have to double down on while making sure that our police leadership is in agreement with that strategy as well.
San Antonio is growing rapidly. What new public safety challenges do you anticipate as the city continues to expand?
We will have to continue to think about staffing and how we support the population, making sure that we continue to build and grow as a compassionate city. That’s been one of our focuses that former mayor Ron Nirenberg really spoke a lot about.
I think the more that we lead from city hall with those values that we believe in as San Antonians, the stronger that we will be from a public safety standpoint.
How do you plan to hold public safety departments accountable while also ensuring they have the resources they need?
Teamwork. It’s done through teamwork and collaboration. That’s the way any leadership is done, by setting clear expectations, making sure we know what outcomes it is that we are tracking. Then holding anyone accountable for mistakes that happen. You know, in education, we say that a lot.
Now we do have challenges where we have officers and incidents that we have to hold someone accountable for and our team has done a great job of holding folks accountable, so we’ll continue to do that.
Technology like surveillance cameras, facial recognition, emergency response systems often come up in recent conversations on public safety as it continues to grow and expand. Where do you stand on expanding tech based solutions in the city?
I think there’s an opportunity there, but they have to be done with respect to the public. If you’ve read the book Animal Farm, we’ve got to make sure that we don’t have a Big Brother-like style in the community. We just want to make sure that we are focusing on, how do we use technology in the best way?
I always go back to my school’s analogies, right? You can use technology for good in schools, to really help amplify learning, individualize the way a kid is learning, but can also be a detractor. So finding that balance and making sure it’s not being abused is the biggest thing.
It’s hard to just say no technology ever. We’re not using anything you know, and that’s not necessarily the right way forward. It’s figuring out what those rules are that will make it be used safely.
