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Two men in navy polo shirts ease a black-and-white Crown Victoria through a quiet Northeast Side subdivision, moving meticulously through its streets. The car looks like a San Antonio Police unit at first glance — spotlight on the driver’s side, push bumper on the front, and a red and blue light bar on top.
But this one belongs to the neighborhood.
Behind the wheel is Howard McClelland, a 78-year-old pharmacist. In the car with him is Tom Suk, an 80-year-old retired “newspaper man” who spent three decades covering cops and fires in Iowa. Both men are veterans, Army and Navy respectively, and both now spend part of their free time slowly looping the streets of Steubing Ranch, serving as the “eyes and ears” for police as part of San Antonio’s Citizens on Patrol Program.
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Citizen on Patrol (COP) is a community crime watch program where participants are trained in observing suspicious activities and contacting emergency services. Participants must submit an application and complete a four hour training class prior to coordinating patrols with other COP graduates in their neighborhood.
“We’re a mobile neighborhood watch,” Suk said as he rolled past the community park. “We observe, we report. If we have problems, we call SAPD. That’s it. We’re not police — we don’t go looking for confrontation.”
SAPD public information officer Ricardo Guzman said the department sees that value clearly.
“These kinds of programs, the COP programs, assist our officers with deterring crime [which] alleviates our workload to be able to focus on the areas that need more assistance. It’s a great program,” he said.
While numerous COP units exist across San Antonio, Steubing Ranch’s unit is unusually committed. There are 17 members on the roster, in a community of roughly 900 to 1,000 homes. Almost all have military service, with members ranging in age from 78 to 86.
“Our leader is 86. I’m 80. He’s the baby, he’s 79” Suk said, nodding toward McClelland, who quickly corrected him. “Actually, I told you wrong, I’m only 78,” McClelland said with a laugh. “We actually thought about changing it from COP to GOP — Geezers on Patrol.”
Members of the unit purchase their own custom COP branded navy polos, hats and khaki pants. Their patrol car, a retired SAPD Crown Vic from 2009, was purchased entirely through donations from neighborhood residents in 2017. The Volunteers pay for the gas, insurance and maintenance out of their own pockets and through recurring fundraisers.
The Steubing Ranch Citizens on Patrol car sits at Bruce Campbell Park. The vehicle was purchased through donations from residents in 2017. Credit: Diego Medel / San Antonio Report
“We’re so proud that we are backed by our citizens,” Suk said. ”We’re out here shaking a red can sometimes two times a year, and they hold events for us.”
When it comes to serving the community, the unit’s work is more methodical than dramatic. Patrols are intentionally irregular — sometimes from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m., sometimes early morning, even 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. — partly because volunteers have jobs and families and partly to keep potential criminals guessing.
“It kind of keeps the bad guys off-balance if they don’t know when we’re going to patrol. And because they do talk to each other, and they know we patrol here,” McClelland said. “We just drive around the neighborhood, and this unit itself, as well as the patrol, is a deterrent.”
Howard McClelland patrols the neighborhoods of Steubing Ranch, where volunteer patrol times range from early mornings to late nights. Credit: Diego Medel / San Antonio Report
Most nights, they cruise slowly through the neighborhood and a smaller adjoining loop residents call “Little Steubing Ranch.” They keep an eye out for open garage doors after midnight, porch pirates around the holidays, mail theft from the older cluster mail boxes, after-hours visitors to the neighborhood swimming pool and park, plus looking for faulty streetlights, water leaks or infrastructure issues to report to city departments.
“It’s somewhat ironic, though: This is a 440 [model] with a turbo [engine], and we spend most of our time on Knollcreek driving at 20 miles an hour.” Suk said as he chuckled. “Or we’re driving around here at 30 miles an hour.”
But their presence, the pair said, has occasionally assisted in bigger cases. In 2018, the group bought game cameras to monitor all 26 mailbox clusters in the subdivision. The cameras were fussy and expensive, but once, It clearly caught the license plate of a mail thief.
“We managed to get a good plate number from this one. They’re not the best from trying to read plates. We got lucky with that one, though.” Suk said. “ We finally had to give up on that program, though. The cameras weren’t that good.”
Suk said that plate number led to a dozen people being arrested in a major mail theft ring based out of Floresville with “bags and bags of mail.”
In another case, the impact was lifesaving. Longtime coordinator for the unit Bruce Campbell, for whom the neighborhood park is now named, was driving through the neighborhood one afternoon after a patrol when someone flagged him down about an injured man lying on the grass next to his lawnmower.
“Bruce thought maybe the lawnmower threw a rod, because the man was bleeding heavily from the leg,” Suk said. “He went to stop the bleeding, looked up and there was a woman standing in the doorway with a gun. She’d shot her husband.”
Campbell used his military training to control the bleeding until paramedics arrived, Suk said. “And everybody said he’d save that man’s life. He would have bled out. He actually got an award for it.”
Campbell was awarded the Compassionate San Antonian award by then-District 10 San Antonio city councilman Clayton Perry in 2020 for his lifesaving actions.
At age 86, Campbell has now stepped down as coordinator and handed the reins to McClelland.
As much as McClelland and Suk enjoy their work, both men know they won’t be doing it forever. For all their jokes about being “Geezers on Patrol,” McClelland and Suk aren’t shy about the concern beneath the humor: The unit works well for now because a handful of retirees have decided this is how they want to use their time. Eventually, they said, someone younger will have to take the wheel.
“We do this as much as we can. We would like to be out here more,” McClelland said. “We would like to have younger people join the program. We don’t seem to have a lot of luck with that right now.”
Suk nodded. “Yeah, but people raising a family and working, how can they get out from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m.? They can’t do it. I know I couldn’t do this when I was working.”
Officer Jairo Sanchez briefs prospective Citizens on Patrol members during the first COP training class at the St. Mary’s Substation. Credit: Diego Medel / San Antonio Report
Elsewhere in the city, a different kind of pipeline may be forming. A few days after the Oct. 16 patrol, SAPD held its first Citizen on Patrol class at its newest substation on St. Mary’s Street in hopes of recruiting more units like Steubing Ranch’s.
Only three residents from the SAFFE district showed up to the inaugural class, a semi-retired attorney, a police academy hopeful and a student studying to become a detective.
Officer Jairo Sanchez, the San Antonio Fear Free Environment officer for the substation, briefed attendees on the basics of the program, from how COP volunteers observe and report issues to when to contact emergency services. It was informal, straightforward and aimed at giving participants a sense of how they might fit into neighborhood-level patrols.
The Steubing Ranch Citizens on Patrol car was purchased through donations from residents in 2017. Credit: Diego Medel / San Antonio Report
Back in the Crown Vic, McClelland and Suk say they’ll keep patrolling as long as they can — crawling the same streets at 30 mph, waving to the same neighbors and joking about being “Geezers on Patrol.”
What they do isn’t flashy, they said, but it keeps their community safe.
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