SAN ANTONIO – The dog looked more scared than aggressive.
Holding a catch pole in his hands, Cpl. Martin Garza stood at the end of a gap between two fences as his fellow Animal Care Services officers coaxed the nervous shepherd mix toward him.
Garza had been dispatched to a West Side ice cream shop where a dog matching its description had reportedly been chasing off pedestrians. After driving around, he spotted it a few houses down on Cincinnati Avenue.
But with the collarless dog dodging between the street side and the alleys behind the homes, he had called in backup.
“Yeah, I got her,” Garza said as the dog yipped and struggled against the leash around its neck.
As Garza and the other officers loaded the dog into a kennel on his truck, it was a successful completion of one of the more than 50,000 “critical calls” the city gets every year.
Calls include public safety issues like dogs acting aggressively or being reported in public areas like schools or businesses, or roaming near the highway. They may also involve cruelty or an animal’s health.
Three years ago, the department responded to only about 44% of those calls. Now the department is expected to end the current fiscal year at the end of the month with a more than 93% critical response rate. ACS said most of the calls get a same-day response.
Its goal is to hit 98.5% in the upcoming 2027 fiscal year, beginning Oct. 1.
The turnaround, ACS Director Jon Gary said, is largely due to staffing.
“I mean, we’re close to doubling the number of officers that we had to respond to critical calls,” he said.
An ACS spokeswoman said the department now had 69 field officer positions, compared to 44 in FY 2023, though those numbers were across all investigative teams.
When ACS began packing on staff around that time, the department was aiming to hit a 100% response rate by FY 2025.
But by the time it actually started that budget year, its target was just 80%, though it ended up reaching 86%.
Gary arrived at ACS midway through that fiscal year and thinks the initial expectation was “a little unrealistic.”
It took longer to fill positions and train the new officers, he said, and they underestimated what it meant to grow so quickly — training more people than the ACS ever had in its history.
“So I thinks it took us a little longer to get it ramped up, but we got it figured out now and we’re doing a much, much better job,” he said.
The department could work on retaining officers, he said, but he thinks they have as many as they need to get to a 100% response rate, “or as close as we possibly can anyway.”
ACS staff are “definitely going to try” to respond to all the calls, Gary said, but he said it will be tough.
“We want to respond to 100%, but we do know that that’s going to be a challenge just to do the volume of calls that we get,” he said. “And then it only takes a couple of things to happen. Even if it’s a computer, for instance — a call didn’t come through in time on a computer. Things like that can happen.”
ACS said bite cases are logged and handled separately. However, there may be some statistical overlap with critical calls from more severe cases or those reported during an ongoing incident with aggressive dogs.
An ACS spokeswoman said from October through August, the department had worked more than 96% of the bite cases reported. The others, she said, could include reports that hadn’t been investigated yet, as well as cases that proved unfounded or were reported after the 10-day quarantine timeline.
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