The first eight months of 2024 in San Antonio saw a 3% reduction in overall crime compared to the same period last year, San Antonio Police Department Chief William McManus told City Council’s Public Safety Committee on Tuesday.

The city has launched violent crime reduction strategies and a property crime task force in recent years — but experts, including McManus, stopped short of attributing the overall decrease to any one program or initiative.

“I think that it’s probably a combination of different things,” he told the committee. “Number one is … the number of people that we arrest depends on how long they’re held in jail [or] pretrial [and] depends how long they’re sentenced [for] — if they’re sentenced at all.”

Instead, it’s the criminal justice system working together overall that “is the bigger determinant of whether crime is down or whether crime is up,” McManus added.

About 18 months into the implementation of the Violent Crime Reduction Plan, it is still too early to attribute these decreases entirely to “hot spot” policing, said Michael Smith, a UTSA criminology and criminal justice professor and director of the university’s Center for Applied Community and Policy Research.

“We’re very careful not to make those sort of bold claims,” Smith said. “Crime is complex. There’s lots of things that go into it — lots of things that we can’t control and don’t control for. And so, on some level, there’s never a good enough answer.”

But the numbers continue to show a flattening trend in violent crime despite population growth, he said. “This is really good news.”

So-called “crimes against persons” — mostly violent crimes — and crimes against society, or robbery, drugs and weapons, were both down by about 2%. Property crimes were down nearly 3.5% this year so far, according to SAPD figures.

Motor vehicle thefts, which drove an overall increase in crime last year, which McManus framed as “giving us the blues” in recent years, are down by about 27% — meaning about 3,400 fewer vehicles were reported stolen this year so far.

Meanwhile, reports of criminal mischief, or destruction, damage or vandalism, were up 35.5%. McManus told reporters he anecdotally noticed an increased number of these reports coming from downtown businesses.

“The reports that I get when I meet with folks is primarily … [about] people that appear to be living on the street,” he said.

‘Hot spot’ policing

San Antonio continues to flatten the curve of certain violent crimes this year after four years of trending upward, data collected by UTSA showed. Those crimes tracked include murder, aggravated assault, robbery and deadly conduct.

The first phase of the Violent Crime Reduction Plan, launched in early 2023, involves “hot spot” policing, where officers park police vehicles with their lights on within various high-crime areas for 15- to 20-minute intervals. Starting this year, instead of having police officers sit in their vehicles during that time, they are now directed to get out of the car to patrol on foot and interact with the community.

“The goal here is to drive down crime in those high crime areas and therefore hopefully impact violent crime in larger areas,” Smith said.

The first six months of 2024 saw average monthly counts of nearly all crime types — except for business robberies, which were up about 17% — were down compared to last year, Smith noted. The largest decrease was seen in murder with 30% fewer reports.

The hot spots treated saw an 8% decrease in violent crime compared to about 5% citywide.

A more in-depth analysis of the plan’s second year of data as well as the second phase of implementation at a South East Side apartment complex will be presented to council in early 2025.

“Is it possible that the crime was trending downward before the crime plan? Sure,” Smith said. “It’s also possible that the … crime plan steepened that drop.”

Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2), who has been skeptical of the plan, noted that a recent, preliminary uniformed crime report data indicates that violent crime is down nationwide.

“I find it challenging to attribute decreases in crime to efforts of the department or efforts of the [plan],” McKee-Rodriguez said. “What I would be interested in is if we can look at maybe the same data, but for the cities that we compare ourselves to; major cities in Texas, cities of comparable size.”

But comparisons to national and city crime data are not always apples-to-apples, Smith said after the meeting.

“There’s significant problems with our national crime data right now,” he said. “We’ve got some of the nation’s largest police departments that don’t report data to the FBI anymore. So when you read information in the media that says crime is down nationwide, violent crime is down nationwide, that’s based on a sample of what the agencies are reporting to the FBI, and that sample is quite a bit smaller than it used to be.”

But not all cities have migrated to NIBRS and those still using UCR have different policies on how crimes are categorized.

What matters most to McManus is that crime in San Antonio is decreasing overall.

“It beats a 3% increase, right?” he said. “Any reduction at all is fewer victims. So I’m grateful for 3%.”