On a hot summer day nearly four years ago at the San Antonio Mennonite Church, the community hit a boiling point on domestic violence.
The chapel was packed with concerned residents and elected officials as more than a dozen survivors of domestic violence shared their stories, those of lost loved ones and frustrations with disconnected legal and law enforcement systems that were supposed to protect them.
“Speaker after speaker after speaker talked about how the system failed them,” said Colleen Bridger, who attended that town hall in 2019 as an assistant city manager. In three years since then, she said Thursday, “the tightening up of the system has been quite spectacular.”
The Collaborative Commission on Domestic Violence, which is led by the City of San Antonio and Bexar County and partners with dozens of agencies and nonprofits, released its Third Year Progress Report on Thursday, highlighting the progress the commission made from October 2021 through December 2022 on education and awareness efforts, intervention training, connecting survivors to resources and improving legal processes.
Bridger, one of the founding co-chairs of the commission who now works as a consultant for the city, and other commission leaders spoke to reporters inside the Mennonite Church ahead of the release of the report.
One of the goals is to make sure that entering the “domestic violence ecosystem” is seamless no matter where one enters, said María Villagómez, deputy city manager and co-chair of the commission.
“You may not necessarily enter through a 911 call, you may enter through a nonprofit organization, through school [or] referral from your doctor,” she said. “We’re collaborating to make it easier for that individual to go through it.”
The commission was established less than two months after the town hall by a special order from then-state district Judge Peter Sakai, who is now Bexar County judge. The city’s five-year domestic violence prevention plan, informed by the commission, was unveiled later that year and identifies gaps in services and policies.
Statistics showed there were 25 domestic violence deaths in Bexar County in 2018 — the highest rate in the state — and those numbers had nearly tripled since 2015.
That number rose during the pandemic, to 36 in 2020, but then dropped back to 24 in 2021, the commission’s last data report, released in 2022, showed.
“The system was often hard to enter, slow to respond to pleas for help, and really ineffective at dealing with the myriad of effects that domestic violence incidents [and] ongoing domestic violence relationships can have on not just victims and survivors, but perpetrators and their children,” said Judge Monique Diaz, who co-chairs the commission and presides over Bexar County’s 150th Civil District Court.
The system has improved, said Patricia Castillo, executive director of the P.E.A.C.E. Initiative, which advocates for survivors of domestic violence.
There are still “kinks here and there,” and room for continued improvement, Castillo said. “But overall, I have seen it improve. I’ve had to call the police chief [about problems] less. … I feel like that line of communication is much greater because of the fact that we’ve all stepped out of our silos, and we’re all willing to come together.”
According to the commission, survivors are now assigned case workers who follow their case through the law enforcement and judiciary process, more than 300 medical students have received training on family dynamics and resources available for survivors, three schools have adopted curricula on teen dating violence and healthy relationships and judges who oversee civil and criminal cases of domestic violence have a new tool aimed at keeping guns away from perpetrators.
“Civil protective order cases or defendants who are convicted of family violence are prohibited from possessing firearms,” Diaz said. The commission’s Judiciary Committee has worked over the past three years to refine a process that allows judges to issue orders to establish compliance — which compels a defendant to prove they don’t have a gun.
Judges, however, are not required to issue these orders, Diaz said, and “there’s a different level of comfort” among judges to do so.
Last year was the first time the county court system began tracking these orders; 536 were filed and 10 firearms were transferred to law enforcement.
Those numbers are similar to other jurisdictions that have similar processes, Diaz said. Police are not allowed to search the property of a defendant in these cases, but if they fail to comply, it could lead to an arrest warrant.
As the commission continues its work into year four, it will be structured differently.
Instead of divvying up tasks among its eight committees, the entire commission will be working together next year, Diaz said. Their goals include increasing training and technical assistance for individuals or groups who want to know how to assist survivors and perpetrators, applying lessons learned from the lived experiences of survivors and perpetrators, increasing legal services for survivors and developing a communication strategy to raise awareness about the dangers of domestic violence and start breaking down the deep-seated cultural and familial ties to violence.
Castillo said she wants to see more parents enroll in the city’s Positive Parenting Program, so they can learn how to better communicate with their children “instead of just throwing a shoe.”
She condemned the name “Flying Chanclas” as the temporary moniker for the San Antonio Missions baseball team.
That change in attitude will require a significant cultural shift, Bridger said.
“We need to make sure that we’re all consistently helping people understand that violence is never the solution to any problem,” she said. “And we need to work on … respecting the autonomy of the woman when she chooses to enter the system or when she chooses not to enter the system.”
