San Antonio police officers respond to the scene of a shooting at a Travelodge/Ramada Inn motel near the intersection of Military Drive West and U.S. 90 in this Oct. 15, 2025, file photo. A man was killed and two officers were wounded during a shootout.
Sam Owens/San Antonio Express-News
Three City Council members wanted to secure a public commitment that their colleagues would support hiring 65 police officers next year, but what they got was the brush-off.
Council members Marina Alderete Gavito, Misty Spears and Marc Whyte last month pitched a resolution “affirming City Council support for hiring 65 police officers in FY 2027.” But they had no takers among their seven colleagues or Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones during Thursday’s council meeting.
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Instead, Jones and the City Council voted 11-0 to send the resolution to council’s five-member Public Safety Committee to discuss at its first meeting in May, ahead of budget talks that are set to start later that month.
But this much was clear Thursday: a council majority appears unwilling to increase San Antonio’s police force at the expense of other city programs and departments.
“There’s always trade-offs when we decide to fund one thing over the other, and we just have to make sure we very well understand what those trade-offs are if we move forward with continuing with more officers,” said District 1 Councilwoman Sukh Kaur, who chairs the Public Safety Committee.
Not every council member agrees that paying for up to 65 news officers in the city’s next budget is a good idea, especially with declining violent crime rates and the health department, which supports violence prevention programs, facing steep federal funding cuts.
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The city is also expected to soon increase spending on its existing force. The police union is negotiating a new multi-year labor contract with the city, which will include a series of yet-to-be-determined annual pay raises for potentially the next three years.
“None of us are debating whether we should hire more officers,” said District 2 Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez, who supports increasing city spending on other efforts that prevent crime, such as installing streetlights or expanding access to after-school programs.
“That discussion will happen in the budget, and we may very well support the addition of however many officers,” he said. “But we do it alongside a handful of other challenging decisions.”
Alderete Gavito, Spears and Whyte want the city to stick to a hiring plan it adopted in 2023 after receiving a partial staffing study from consultant Alexander Weiss, who died before he could finish his report. The city hired his consulting partner to complete the study.
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Before he died, Weiss had determined the number of officers the SAPD would need to achieve a 60%-40% split between the time officers spend on “proactive policing” — or crime prevention — and responding to calls for service. From there, city staff determined that SAPD needed 360 additional patrol officers, which they aimed to hire within the next five years.
The fiscal year 2024 budget that council adopted in September 2023 funded 100 of those positions. The following year’s budget added another 65, with the goal of continuing to add 65 over each of the next three fiscal years.
But slowing property and sales tax collections led budget writers to initially include money for just 25 patrol officers in the current budget. After council backlash, especially from Alderete Gavito, Spears and Whyte, the city settled on 40 positions.
It’s unknown how many officers the city’s budget writers will include in the early version of the next budget, which council will adopt in late September.
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The city will continue to face a shortfall between rising expenses and shrinking revenues, which will require spending cuts.
Police spending takes the highest share — 37% — of the city’s $1.7 billion general fund, which pays for public safety, parks, libraries and other city services.
Whyte said Thursday that he believes funding additional patrol positions versus spending on crime prevention programs “is not an either/or” decision.
“We can address the roots of crime — we can fund various programs that will help us do that — but that does not alleviate the need to put officers on the street now,” he said.
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District 6 Councilman Ric Galvan disagreed.
“It is either/or. It’s easy to say it’s not, but that’s just fiscally irresponsible to say that — and unrealistic,” Galvan said.
Each police hire requires revenue to pay their wages and benefits year after year.
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“They require permanent cuts to programs, too,” Galvan added.