The police shooting of San Antonio resident Melissa Perez, a 46-year-old grandmother who struggled with schizophrenia, has again brought the de-escalation and mental health training that police officers receive back into the spotlight.
The three officers involved in the June 23 shooting were suspended from the San Antonio Police Department without pay and charged with murder.
City and police officials have said their actions ran afoul of SAPD’s existing de-escalation policy and training, which has been in place for more than a decade and enhanced this year.
“We have the resources, we have the policy, we have the protocols, we have proper training,” SAPD Assistant Chief Karen Falks told the San Antonio Report. “These officers didn’t follow the policy. … This is just kind of a slap in the face for all the hard work that we’ve done for all these years.”
Sgt. Alfred Flores and officers Eleazar Alejandro and Nathaniel Villalobos — who were with the department for 14, five and two years respectively — were released from jail after posting $100,000 bails the day after the shooting.
Meanwhile, police reform activists and Perez’s family are calling for changes within the department’s policies and culture. The Packard Law Firm of San Antonio has said it will file a civil lawsuit against the City of San Antonio and SAPD on behalf of Perez’s daughter, Alexis Tovar.
“We are horrified by the events that led to the unnecessary death of our mother,” Perez’s family wrote in a statement distributed by their attorney on Thursday. “We loved her dearly, and we are having a very difficult time processing the events surrounding her death. We hope that our mother’s memory can inspire our community to come together and demand the needed changes within SAPD.”
Mayor Ron Nirenberg said he was “disturbed” by the body camera footage of the incident, but it may be “premature” to reevaluate or reform police training.
But the city and the police department should “always be open” to review policy, he said, and there may be an opportunity to ensure officers apply their training to their work in the community.
SAPD’s internal affairs and homicide units are conducting investigations into the shooting, while the Civil Rights Division of the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office conducts a separate investigation.
If the officers aren’t convicted, they will likely face disciplinary action, which may include their firing. Due to changes made in the police union’s labor contract, it’s unlikely that they could get their jobs back under provisions that give the police chief more discretion in misconduct cases.
“I am certainly more confident going into this process than I would have been under the old agreement,” Nirenberg said.
De-escalating crises
Each cadet in the San Antonio Training Academy receives 40 hours of crisis intervention training (CIT), which was implemented in 2008 by Police Chief William McManus. Every three years, all officers take an eight-hour “refresher” CIT course. The training generally involves watching informational videos, presentations and hands-on role-playing.
Earlier this year, officers started taking an additional 40 hours of advanced crisis intervention training that was developed by SAPD’s Mental Health Unit and approved by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, Falks said, which would bring the total baseline hours of crisis intervention training to 80. It will take about three years for all SAPD officers to complete the additional training.
“What makes it different is it’s more scenario-based, focusing more on the escalated mental health [crisis] policy,” which outlines procedures for handling incidents that involve a weapon or violence and mental health issues, Falks said.
It’s unclear if any of the three officers received advanced training, but according to SAPD training policy, Flores should have taken four “refresher” courses, Alejandro should have taken one and Villalobos would not have taken his first refresher course until next year.
The main component of crisis intervention training is de-escalation, Falks said. “It’s learning how to talk to somebody respectfully and calmly … to persuade them to do what you want them to do.”
However long that takes to de-escalate a crisis, and it can take hours or days, “that’s what it’s gonna take,” she said. “That’s, that’s our policy.”
Officers communicated with Perez, who was inside her Southwest Side apartment, through a window on her patio for more than 30 minutes before she was killed, according to SAPD. They were responding to a neighbor’s report that a woman fitting Perez’s description was cutting wires to the apartment complex’s fire alarm system.
She turned away from the officers and started to run toward her apartment, away from the parking lot where they approached her.
“Hey lady, get over here,” an officer said.
She locked her apartment door behind her. An officer pursued her through an open window by pushing through the screen. Police say the officer saw Perez grab a hammer so he pulled his gun and pointed it at her.
“You’re gonna get shot,” an officer said.
“Shoot me,” Perez replied.
After retreating from the patio and talking with her through the window, two officers then jumped over the patio railing toward her. After she shattered her own window with the hammer, three officers opened fire. Perez was pronounced dead at the scene.
Detective Ronald Soto wrote in the arrest affidavit for the officers that Perez “did not pose an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death when she was shot because the defendants had a wall, a window blocked by a television and a locked door between them.”
SAPD policy states that deadly force is “authorized only to protect an officer or another person from what is reasonably believed to be an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury.”
At a press conference held later in the day Perez was killed, McManus condemned the officer’s actions.
“They placed themselves in a situation where they used deadly force, which was not reasonable given all the circumstances as we now understand them,” McManus said.
Are ‘refreshers’ enough?
But SAPD policies and trainings apparently weren’t enough to prevent Perez’s death, said Jade Pacheco, a community builder with ACT 4 SA, a local police reform nonprofit.
For patrol officers, an eight-hour “refresher” course every three years might not be sufficient, she said.
“All officers need continued, extensive training on how to interact as a first responder with mental health crises,” she said. “And to acknowledge that anyone can have a mental health crisis — you don’t have to have [a diagnosis].”
The training failed in this case with three separate officers, including a sergeant, which Pacheco said indicates that there is a problem with the department’s culture.
Police officers may get frustrated when people run away from them, but “police presence is automatically triggering … to whole portions of our community,” she said, noting the recent police shooting of unarmed teenager Erik Cantu.
The responsibility of de-escalation should lie with police officers, not the community, she added, noting that law enforcement is a difficult job. “They see some of the worst things … they should be getting regular mental health [treatment] as well.”
Officers should call for help from social workers or other mental health professionals when that help is needed, she said.
“[Police] will never be as trained as a mental health professional — and we shouldn’t expect them to be,” Pacheco said. “They should have a system in place to where they know who to call for a mental health crisis response.”
SAPD’s Mental Health Unit — comprised of 20 specially trained, experienced officers — is supposed to be called in when any officer needs assistance with such a call, Falks said.
Normal operating hours for the unit is 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., but an additional team, which includes a mental health clinician, is on call at night to respond citywide, she said.
Police were called to Perez’s apartment complex just after midnight.
Asked if the Mental Health Unit should have been called that night, Falks said: “In a perfect world, absolutely. That would have been an ideal situation to call them.”
The Mental Health Unit is deployed across the city daily and those deployments typically do not end with a fatality, she said.
For mental health calls, SAPD can also deploy a team, called SA CORE, which was launched last year. SA CORE sends specially trained police officers, paramedics and licensed clinicians to certain 911 calls. It currently covers the San Antonio Police Department’s Central substation’s territory seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., City Council is slated to expand the program citywide next year, but that team is not the first response to mental health-related calls that involve weapons.
SA CORE is the latest example of the city prioritizing mental health incidents, Falks said.
“We’ve worked very hard to put mental health at the top of the list for so long,” she said.
Perez’s death was not the result of a systemic issue, she added. “It was a failure to supervise by that sergeant, and it was a lack of following procedures and policies and that’s it. And it’s heartbreaking.”
