The Big Payback

San Antonio’s high-profile police misconduct cases could start costing taxpayers

BY MICHAEL KARLIS

Two weeks ago, the nation collectively gasped in horror as explicit body cam footage released by the Memphis Police Department showed officers delivering a brutal beating to unarmed black man Tyre Nichols.

Nichols’ death at the hands of Memphis police is just the latest such incident to grab national headlines in recent years, joining the likes of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others. The Alamo City is no exception.

Last summer, a San Antonio police officer shot and killed unarmed 13-year-old AJ Hernandez, claiming the youth was in danger of striking him with a stolen vehicle. Hernandez was the second civilian killed by the same officer in two years’ time.

In October, national outrage swirled around the police shooting of Erik Cantu, an unarmed 17-year-old who ended up in critical condition. A subsequently fired SAPD officer now faces charges including attempted murder for shooting Cantu multiple times after approaching him in a McDonald’s parking lot to question him about an alleged attempt to avoid arrest the night before.

Over the past 10 years, the City of San Antonio paid out a total of $1,566,300 to settle claims of police brutality and misconduct, according to documents obtained by the Current. The highest of those went to the estate of Jesse Aguirre, which last summer received a $466,300 payout.

Aguirre died in 2013 after a trio of SAPD officers put their weight on him for five and a half minutes, according to city records, leading some observers to call him the “George Floyd of San Antonio.”

However, Aguirre’s settlement was far less than the $27 million Floyd’s estate received from the City of Minneapolis. The case also drew scant media coverage outside of Bexar County. Things may be different now.

The arrival of high-profile civil-rights attorneys Lee Merritt and Ben Crump to represent the families of Hernandez and Cantu, respectively, not to men- tion a heightened national awareness of police accountability brought on by the Black Lives Matter movement, could bring unprecedented scrutiny to allegations of police use of force in San Antonio.

That’s likely to result in higher settlements for victims’ families, experts said.

“I’m not going to say that the quality of a lawyer doesn’t make a difference, because it certainly can and does,” St. Mary’s University law professor and police misconduct expert Gerald Reamey told the Current. “If you look at a track record of a lawyer representing a plaintiff in a case who’s had a lot of success, you’re more inclined to settle, and settle for a higher figure.”

Aguirre was represented by respected San Antonio attorney Edward Pina. Although Pina is a Harvard Law School graduate with a solid reputation, his name doesn’t command the same national attention as Crump or Merritt.

Florida-based Crump has represented the families of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Keenan Anderson, and, most recently, Tyre Nichols. In total, the attorney has landed an impressive $641 million in personal injury settlements, according to his law firm’s website.

Merritt’s Philadelphia law firm also represented Floyd’s family, along with those of Botham Jean, the 26-year-old man shot to death in his apartment by a Dallas cop, and Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old jogger shot and killed after being chased through a Georgia neighborhood by three white men.

Beyond the two attorneys’ formidable records, they command national media attention. That turns up the pressure for municipalities to settle, Reamey said.

“Media is a huge part of it. If you’ve got a George Floyd case, the city is going to have a strong motivation to settle that case,” he said. “If you’ve got a case like that and it goes to a jury, what do you think the jury is going to do with that? Especially with that powerful video.”

Another big difference between past cases of alleged SAPD misconduct and those of Hernandez and Cantu is the national reckoning on race and policing forced by the Black Lives Matter groundswell.

In San Antonio, that shift in attitude is apparent in the arrival of police-reform advocacy group Act 4 SA and 2021’s narrow defeat of Proposition B, a citywide referendum that would have stripped the city’s powerful police union of its ability to engage in collective bargaining. The proposal was defeated on a razor-thin 2% margin.

Act 4 SA, led by founder Ananda Tomas, now appears to have gathered enough petition signatures to put an initiative on the May ballot that would ban police chokeholds and no-knock warrants.

Last month, the nonprofit launched an online database funded by the Urban Institute and Microsoft Justice Reform Initiative to track police officers with misconduct records.

The platform seeks to address the problem of so-called “wandering cops” — those fired in one town who manage to find law-enforcement work in another.

“I’ve always said that San Antonio is ground zero for police reform,” Act 4 SA Executive Director Tomas said. “Our police contract has literally been used as a rubric and template all across the nation because it offers the most benefits and strongest protections.

Those types of protections — and us having one of the highest rehire rates in the nation for fired officers — means that they know that they have these protections that have for decades allowed them to get away with egregious misconduct and actions.”

Under greater scrutiny, the tide could be changing, however.

Nationally, cities spent over $1.5 billion on settlements involving police misconduct between 2010 and 2020, according to a recent Washington Post investigation looking at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments.

While the Post’s number crunching didn’t include San Antonio, the local numbers suggest the settlements the city is willing to pay out are already headed upward.

The sum of the past two settlements between the city and the estates of victims of police violence was more than the previous three combined.

While such payouts are generally covered by insurance claims, taxpayers still end up paying the bill because large enough claims drive up a municipality’s premiums.

“There are some cities that have had to actually pass bond measures to pay for these settlements,” Reamey said. “And if you’re a taxpayer in a city where it’s happening regularly, I’d be demanding a lot of answers from the local police department.”