DEPARTMENT: Government and Public Affairs
DEPARTMENT HEAD: Jeff Coyle
COUNCIL DISTRICTS IMPACTED: City Wide
SUBJECT: Police Services Scientific Survey
SUMMARY:
The Government and Public Affairs Department will brief the Public Safety Committee on a strategy to conduct a scientific community survey regarding police services in San Antonio.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
On December 11, 2020, the City Manager provided a plan to review and analyze police service response over the next several months to the Mayor and City Council. The goal of this review is to distinguish between calls that require a traditional police response from those calls that may be better handled by another City department or combination of police and other service provider.
Part of this plan will focus on understanding the community expectations of police services and develop response alternative recommendations to ensure police officers are placed in encounters that need a law enforcement response. This effort will give the community an opportunity to provide input on what encounters they want to have with police and work with partners to develop response additions or alternatives.
The Department of Government and Public Affairs will present a community engagement plan to the Public Safety Committee on January 29. The goal of this plan is to obtain community that will be used to develop recommendations to the Public Safety Committee. One of the components of this plan is a Scientific Community Survey.
Through an informal solicitation process, the City selected ETC Institute to perform the survey. ETC has extensive experience in local government including conducting community surveys for the City of San Antonio. Since 2000, ETC Institute has designed and administered more than 3,500 statistically valid surveys for more than 1,000 local governments in all 50 U.S. States. During the past 10 years alone, ETC Institute has administered surveys to more than 2,250,000 U.S. residents.
The su...
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