The back-and-forth exchange between two top local officials came after a weekend of violence that left three people dead, including two teens. Credit: Courtesy Photo / City of San Antonio (left) and Michael Karlis (right)

San Antonio Police Chief William McManus and Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales have engaged in a public pissing contest over who’s to blame for the recent string of SAPD officers shot in the line of duty.

McManus has skewered the DA’s office for being soft on crime and letting violent offenders out on bond. Meanwhile, Gonzales argues that SAPD personnel aren’t providing enough evidence for his office to convict criminals.

However, McManus’ grievances with the DA’s office are misguided, according to Gerald S. Reamey, a retired San Antonio St. Mary’s Law School professor who’s also served in law enforcement. Instead of targeting Gonzales, Reamy said, McManus should be mad at the Texas legal system’s rules for setting bail.

“These are unfortunate incidents with the police shootings,” Reamey said. “It’s a terrible thing when that happens. But most of the time, there’s absolutely no correlation between the shooting and whether the person has been released on bail, and if so, how much that bail amount was. It just usually doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

In case anyone needs a refresher, five SAPD officers have been shot and injured by suspects — some of whom were out on bond — since Aug. 24.

“Another SAPD officer was shot and hospitalized a few hours ago by a repeat violent offender who should be in jail,” McManus wrote Sept. 5 on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, following the latest shooting.

In that case, suspect Dominick Rubio, 29, had an aggravated assault warrant and a repeat protective order violation, KSAT reports. However, Rubio being out on the streets isn’t necessarily Gonzales’ fault, according to Reamey.

“Texas law strongly favors releasing people on bail,” Reamey said. “The kind of default position in Texas is that everybody is going to be admitted to bail — with some limited exceptions.”

Typically, Texas judges only deny bail in capital murder cases where the death penalty is on the table. It’s difficult to jail someone, even a repeat violent offender, in perpetuity because a suspect is innocent until proven guilty, Reamey said.

What’s more, the DA’s office isn’t in charge of setting bail. Instead, that responsibility lies with magistrate judges. At a bond hearing, the DA can recommend a minimum bail, but it’s up to the judge whether to act on that recommendation.

“This current disagreement between our police chief and the district attorney has to be seen in a somewhat different light,” Reamey said. “If you think about bail and its real purpose and the way in which it’s used, it’s not really intended to keep people in jail.”

McManus’ tough-on-crime rhetoric also comes days ahead of a critical city council vote. Council is scheduled to decide this Thursday whether to approve SAPD’s $621.1 million budget — an 8.5% increase from the previous fiscal year and the largest budget in the department’s history.

Reamey said McManus’ attacks on the DA come at a time when the chief is hoping to sell the mayor and council on the budget increase.

Even so, as a former law enforcement officer, Reamey said he sympathizes with the chief’s frustration over the safety of his officers.

“The problem with setting bail so high all the time so suspects can’t get out of jail is that we have almost no ability to accurately predict the future dangerousness of a person,” Reamey said. “We don’t know whether somebody is really going to pose a threat. We’re going on past behavior, and while that’s better than no predictor at all, it has not proven a particularly good predictor.”

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This article appears in Sep 6-19, 2023.

Michael Karlis is a multimedia journalist at the San Antonio Current, whose coverage in print and on social media focuses on local and state politics. He is a graduate of American University in Washington,...