The San Antonio Public Safety Committee met on September 23, 2026, at 2:08 p.m., chaired by Chair Core. The committee approved the previous meeting's minutes and received staff briefings on elder abuse and interpersonal violence prevention, a motel safety task force, the residential streetlight gap program, and Animal Care Services performance metrics. The meeting adjourned at approximately 4:03 p.m.
All right, time is now 208 p.m. and we'll call our public safety committee meeting to order. Madam Clerk, could you please call roll council member Jalen McKee Rodriguez? Councilmember Castillo. Councilmember Spears. Councilmember White. Chair Core. Here. Chair, we have core. Okay, the first item on the agenda is approval of minutes from the August 31st public safety committee meeting. Are there any changes that need to be made? If not, I'll take a motion. We have a motion and a second, any discussion. Okay, all in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? All right, motion carries. Item two on the agenda is an update related to the elder abuse and interpersonal violence subcommittees that we've created. We did a memo the last time we met, but we wanted to get the chive the chance to see actual presentation from the work. So who am I handing it over to you first? Oh, Jessica. Yes. Jessica, you're up. Good afternoon, Chair and Committee members. My name's Jessica De Volina, Deputy Human Services Director. And today, Rebecca Floodis, Education Program Administrator and I are going to be providing updates on awareness and prevention efforts related to elder abuse and interpersonal violence. So just for background related to elder abuse, the November 2025, the Public Safety Committee and the Elder Abuse Subcommittee specifically resolved to strengthen protections for older adults and expand opportunities for greater education and awareness. We again presented to the committee in February 2026 on a council consideration request filed by Councilmember Castillo related to enhancing senior protections. And during that presentation, we identified some actions that we could take within existing resources and presented that for committee feedback and next steps. Based on the direction that we received, we have partnered with SAPD, Bear County, as well as Adult Protective Services, some of our contracted providers that are operating at our senior centers and other local stakeholders to implement a number of actions. They focused around enhancing internal and external awareness of elder fraud, abuse, neglect, and exploitation, increasing awareness of not only City of San Antonio services, but larger community services that we can connect older adults to, expanding our internal and external training for frontline city staff, as well as our service providers and older adults themselves. And in addition, we commissioned a study on the status of older adults in San Antonio to identify larger gaps and challenges that older adults in the community beyond just the senior centers are facing. We're highlighting here some of the actions that we took in fiscal year 2026 as part of our implementation plan. As I mentioned, they included a section that specifically focused on enhancing our training and expanding that. So we expanded our don't look away training that we're hosting in collaboration with Adult Protective Services for frontline city staff. We've targeted 10 city departments, but we offer that citywide to other departments through our online training module. We are also giving older adults training on smartphone usage, specifically related to scams and other types of predatory practices that are happening in the community. And that's provided through our contracted partners, primarily Oates and OASIS, but we do bring in other presenters as well. We are also through our work with our benefits navigators and our financial counselor enrolling older adults in the do not call registry to try to stop some of those solicitation calls that they receive. We've developed and distributed a resource guide that's available both in English and Spanish. We've also distributed it to our partners so we can kind of spread that reach to the larger community, and we actually worked with SACRID to post that on their website among other older adult resources on their older adult portal. We created in collaboration with DSD a printable no solicitation sign that older adults can place in their yards. We distributed that through the senior centers. It's available in both the English and Spanish. And we actually created a printable PDF that we could distribute to our partners. So if they wanted to print additional signs, we actually encourage them to do that to share with the older adults that they serve at their sites. We've also worked on launching a number of PSAs and also distributing a quarterly newsletter through our senior centers to highlight comments, scams, and other types of fraud activities. We are also continuing our partnership with Adult Protective Services. And once a year during older abuse awareness month, we're actually celebrating and doing a walk for a cause to raise awareness.