Ten years ago, Valerie Narvaez had just gotten sober and was staying at Haven for Hope, San Antonio’s largest homeless shelter and services hub. During that time, she would walk around downtown and the near West Side to reach out to others who might need help or a listening ear.
“I was crossing a street and there was a man [who was] seizing,” Narvaez said. “This man needed help and I ran to him and I was trying to help him [when] I heard someone yell at me: ‘Get away from him, he’s just an alcoholic.'”
When she turned around, she was surprised to see that the comment came from a uniformed police officer.
“My response was: ‘So am I. I’m a recovering alcoholic — what does that matter in this moment? Help him,'” she recalled. That one negative interaction with an officer “created a story in my head that the police were not safe, that they were bad, they were judgmental, and they did not understand.”
Narvaez relayed this story to three young SAPD cadets on Wednesday inside a small classroom at Christian Assistance Ministry, where she now serves as director of homeless services.
These cadets will join a group of about 70 SAPD cadets who have completed SAPD’s Community Immersion Program, a unique pilot program that sends cadets out into the neighborhoods where they will eventually be assigned. The goal is to have them form bonds with or at least familiarize themselves with area stakeholders — including local businesses, neighborhood associations, nonprofit organizations and religious and civic leaders they’ll likely be interacting with.
For 14 weeks, cadets enrolled in the program will spend about two hours per week at various locations. Typically, cadets are assigned to different substations across the city according to need, but the pilot also allows cadets to know where they will end up once they graduate.
By showing cadets different stakeholder perspectives, Narvaez hopes all officers and community members can avoid the kind of negative interaction she experienced a decade ago.
“My hope and prayer is that this escalates to a nationwide thing,” she said. “I believe it will just completely change the path, not only for our clients, but it’s going to create a level of wellness for our officers.”
The pilot, launched in mid-2022, is an example of community-oriented policing tactics that aim to enhance community partnerships with law enforcement. Such programs have gained popularity in recent years due to the global civil unrest that erupted after a police officer in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd in 2020.
SAPD Officer Francisco Javier, who moved to San Antonio from New Jersey in 2021, was a cadet in one of the program’s first cohorts. When Javier was first told about the program, he saw it as a good way to get to know the city.
“I’m not originally from here, let’s give it a try,” he recalled thinking. “Ever since, it’s been great.”
Before the program and meeting Christian Assistance Ministry staff and clients, “I never understood why people become homeless,” he said. “You get to put yourself in their shoes, and you get to understand where they’re coming from.”
The SAPD pilot hopes to improve de-escalation, increase peaceful encounters with police, increase police understanding of community concerns and increase trust and collaboration between the department and the public, nonprofit and city, officials said.
It aims to build on existing de-escalation and crisis intervention training that officers receive and add to the department’s other community policing initiatives, such as the SAFFE (San Antonio Fear Free Environment) officers stationed at each substation and Citizen Police Academy.
Another unique element of the pilot is that it’s being developed and studied in partnership with researchers from Texas A&M San Antonio, Brown University and Georgetown University.
“Remarkably, there’s almost no research [on community-oriented policing and] very little guidance on how do you operationalize that fuzzy concept into a discrete thing that a department can do,” said David Yokum, director of Brown University’s Policy Lab.
The Community Immersion Program is a “rare,” “concrete” example of putting community-oriented policing into action, he said. The research performed by Yokum and others can show if and how it impacts the police officers’ and residents’ interactions.
“What we’re seeing preliminarily is that people are very positive about this,” Yokum said.
A different approach
The three cadets listened to Narvaez and her colleagues intently with serious, steely expressions on their faces — save for a few moments of levity.
After her interaction with the apathetic officer, Narvaez said she was on a mission.
“I watch a lot of ‘Law & Order.’ In my head, I’m Olivia Benson,” she said, referring to the detective character played by Mariska Hargitay in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
The dozens of charms on her heavy, silver bracelet chimed as she gestured toward the smiling cadets. “I started literally stalking y’all. I even tried to download a police scanner and I was showing up to hotspots where I knew police were going to be called on homelessness. And I threw myself in with you guys.”
But what she found surprised her yet again.
One officer, a member of SAPD’s then-fledgling Homeless Outreach Positive Encounters (HOPE) team, drove Narvaez and a colleague to visit a woman whom they knew needed to go to the hospital. The officer gave them all a ride.
That unexpected kindness “tripped me out,” she said.
Another officer physically picked up a man who had soiled himself, slung the man over his shoulder and carried him up the River Walk steps to a patrol vehicle to take him to the hospital, Narvaez said.
She watched yet another officer carefully place shoes onto a man’s feet at a Greyhound station.
“He just grabbed the shoes, he knelt down, he wiped [the man’s] feet and put his shoes on his feet,” she recalled to reporters. “And I was just like: ‘What are you doing? … [Police] don’t do those things. You’re on your knees right now for this person, loving on him.'”
“…That’s when I started to really let my resentment go and actually engage with the officers,” she said.
Those kinds of connections and education — for both officers and the community — are what the pilot Community Immersion Program hopes to increase, she said.
“We’re not trying to change their perception, we’re trying to add to it,” Narvaez said.
During the session on Wednesday, she asked one of the cadets to crawl in and lie down inside a small cocoon made of cardboard boxes to simulate just one part of how some people experience homelessness.
“If I told you that this is where you went to bed and this is where you wake up every morning, how would you feel?” she asked.
“Frustrated,” the muffled answer came from cadet Josh Barrientos, as Narvaez wrote his responses on the outside of the box.
“I feel constricted,” he said. “Why am I still in here? … How can I get out?”
SAPD Community Engagement Officer Joel Pope, who oversees the program, also crawled into the makeshift shelter.
“I don’t feel safe in here,” Pope said.
Narvaez explained that in reality, people who wake up in situations like this every day, such as a dear friend of hers who now lives in his own tiny home at Towne Twin Village, have a different perspective.
As her friend Neville Mupfeka described it to her, inside his own space he felt “warm” and “safe.” It “calmed the voices, he said, and “it made him feel loved, and a part of something because he had a routine.” Every day, a woman who worked at the Subway downtown would save the right-sized boxes for him to use.
To bridge that divergence in perspective between police and the unhoused, Dominic Yanas, who holds a master’s degree in public administration and a bachelor’s degree in communication and psychology, shared some communication tactics and theories with the cadets.
The uncertainty reduction theory‘s premise holds that people are typically motivated to communicate with strangers in order to reduce the uncertainty of not knowing a person’s wants, needs or motives, Yanas said.
“If you don’t know what my crisis is, if I’m under the influence [of drugs], those are all uncertainties. It is a stressful situation,” he said. “But the good news is that that communication is a developmental process. It’s not one conversation, it’s many conversations.”
Yanas encouraged the officers not to get “discouraged if the conversation didn’t go the way you wanted to,” he said. “The quality and nature of information that people share can change over time.”
Yanas has experienced homelessness and has had several run-ins with police that violated his expectations in both positive and negative ways.
When his mental health “took a nosedive” several years ago, an apathetic police officer told Yanas his hallucinations were “all in my head.”
But during a later crisis at a Walgreens, he was “shaky, nervous, scattered, hyper-vigilant” and just trying to catch a bus home when a police officer walked with Yanas 100 yards across the street to the bus stop. “The whole way [he gave me] words of encouragement. Just conversation, time and attention. It violated my expectations,” but in a positive way, he said.
Measuring success
The idea for the pilot originated in the SAPD’s recently-created Community Engagement Unit, said Pope, who has worked for SAPD for 24 years.
Chief William McManus established the unit in January 2022, and its two officers, including Pope, embarked on a listening tour of the city.
“We realized the theme very quickly that people love to talk to us and they love to tell us what they would view as potentially creating a better collaboration [and] relationship with the police department,” Pope said. “We realized that this is a great opportunity for the cadets.”
SAPD already invites several community stakeholders to speak to cadets at the police academy, but this pilot program allows them to see the spaces and neighborhoods in which residents operate and live, he said.
“The uniform means different things to different folks,” Pope said. “So we have some pretty frank conversations. … It’s important for the cadets to … hear those things while they’re learning how to be officers — it just makes a very well-rounded police officer.”
As the pilot was taking shape, Pope’s unit connected with the city’s Office of Innovation and its R&D League, a division dedicated to establishing partnerships in and outside of the city to investigate new ideas and facilitate evidence-based policymaking.
In some ways, the pilot is still taking shape through feedback from cadets and community partners, said Yokum, the researcher from Brown University. “We’re still trying to learn: What’s the best way to do this?'”
The structure of the various stakeholder sessions still varies, he said. “If it’s the YMCA, they might be playing basketball with kids and things like that. If it’s with a local pastor, they might be having a round table discussion about policing issues or homelessness in the neighborhood.”
Once the program design is finalized, Yokum and his colleagues will prepare to perform a randomized control trial to measure its impact, meaning they will compare the outcomes of officers who participate to those who do not.
Possible metrics include the number of complaints filed against the officers, how long SAPD employs them and how likely they are to use force, he said. “We could attribute that as best as a scientist ever could [to] the one thing we’ve controlled to be different between these two groups, namely, whether they have this Community Immersion Program experience.”
Ideally, the framework for the program analysis would be informed by broader community input later this year, Yokum said.
The results of that analysis, however, could take several years to reveal, he said. In order to be statistically significant, enough time has to pass in the careers of the officers and more cadets need to enter the program.
The sample size — currently about 70 cadets — needs to increase to the hundreds, he said. The current cohort includes 10 cadets out of a class of about 50.
“I do think there’s good odds that another couple of cities might end up wanting to replicate this program, so might have a chance to have a coordinated, multi-city evaluation,” Yokum said.
The Austin Police Department may be interested in a similar program, Pope said, and he would like to see it scale locally to include every cadet that comes through SAPD’s academy.
First, he said, the department will have to see “what the data is going to show [and] how effective it’s going to be.”
Fixed. Think it’s on the line of small enough to just fix but wording could be
Correction: This story has been updated to correctly refer to David Yokum’s university.
