Metro Health presented new data at a Community Health Committee meeting showing declines in shootings, homicides and other violent crimes since launching San Antonio’s regional violence prevention strategy.
But with the city entering what officials have described as a difficult budget cycle, council members quickly turned to a different question: Which programs are actually driving those results?
The department reported violent crime rates declined across every major category it tracked between 2022 and 2025, including a 56% drop in homicides, a 46% decline in shootings and smaller decreases in assaults and sexual violence.
Officials highlighted the city’s five-year Regional Violence Prevention Strategic Plan and the Stand Up SA violence interruption program as key components of its public health approach to reducing violence, which operates on an approximately $11.5 million annual budget.
Officials stressed, however, that the improvements cannot be directly attributed to any one initiative. Violence prevention administrator Erica Haller-Stevenson said multiple public safety efforts — including SAPD’s hotspot policing strategy, problem-oriented place-based policing and Metro Health’s prevention programs — were implemented during the same time period, making it impossible to isolate the impact of any single intervention.
That caveat became the central focus of the committee’s discussion.
As city leaders prepare for what has been described as one of San Antonio’s most challenging budget cycles in years, District 10 Councilmember Marc Whyte questioned how they could determine which violence prevention programs were producing the greatest return on taxpayer dollars if officials could not directly connect individual initiatives to broader declines in violent crime.
“We got tough fiscal times here in the city right now,” Whyte said. “If this $11 million [budget] was cut to $7 [million] or $8 [million], what would you want to make sure we keep?”
Hard to measure
Metro Health officials said they cannot currently calculate a return on investment for individual programs. Instead, Haller-Stevenson said public health interventions are evaluated differently than traditional policing strategies.
While law enforcement can often compare crime rates before and after a tactic is deployed in a specific area, she said public health programs measure whether conditions improve across an entire population over time, making it difficult to attribute citywide trends to any one effort.
She pointed to Stand Up SA — the city’s violence interruption program that deploys outreach workers with lived experience to mediate conflicts, mentor people at high risk of gun violence and connect them with services—as one example.
“What we do know is that 488 violent conflicts were interrupted in fiscal year 2025,” Haller-Stevenson said.
Those interventions, she said, represent conflicts that had the potential to escalate into shootings even if they cannot be statistically linked to the city’s overall decline in violent crime.
Whyte acknowledged that community-based violence intervention is inherently harder to measure than policing tactics, but said council members will need better information as they begin working on the budget.
“We’re going to have to make a lot of tough decisions like this,” Whyte said. “We’re not going to be able to do everything that we’re doing right now moving forward.”
Return on investment
Other council members argued that uncertainty should not diminish the value of prevention efforts.
District 5 Councilmember Teri Castillo urged colleagues to consider the role these programs play in preventing violence before it occurs by connecting residents with mentors, employment opportunities and other support before they become involved in violence.
Committee Chair Ric Galvan (D6) said the discussion highlighted the need for better evaluation tools to help future councils understand which investments are having the greatest impacts. He asked whether additional grant funding could help the city measure the effectiveness of its violence prevention strategy.
Haller-Stevenson said Metro Health had hoped to secure grant funding for a dedicated staff member to track implementation of the regional violence prevention strategy, collect data from partner organizations and evaluate outcomes across the city, but those grants never materialized.
“The Office of Injury and Violence Prevention at CDC was dismantled,” Haller-Stevenson told council members. “Pretty much all federal funding is coming out of the Department of Justice.”
She said the remaining federal funding opportunities are largely geared toward law enforcement and court-based initiatives rather than public health violence prevention programs.
The programs discussed Thursday were largely built during years of expanding city investment in violence prevention.
Following a record number of intimate partner homicides in 2018, San Antonio designated domestic violence services as a priority and significantly increased funding for prevention efforts.
With the city now preparing for a difficult budget cycle, council members indicated those investments — once viewed as essential — could face closer scrutiny than they have in years.
