Speaker 1: On the record is presented by launch essay, San Antonio, small business owners.

San Antonio is a fast growing fast moving community with something new happening every day.

And that's why each week we go on the record with the Newsmakers who are driving this change.

Then we gather at the reporters round table to talk about the latest news stories with the journalists behind those stories.

Join us now, as we go on Speaker 2: Two on the record, my name is Tuesday night in late March San Antonio opened its stores to hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children at the Freeman Coliseum today, nearly 1400 children are housed at the facility, but it has not been without controversy allegations have come forward of abuse and some other issues, Texas governor Greg Abbott has used the Coliseum as a backdrop to blast the president's immigration policy.

Watching this all unfold is our first guest Jonathan Ryan with the organization.

Could I use this, Jonathan?

Thank you so much for being here with us today.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me now, I, we already talked about your zoom background and how wonderful that is, but I know you are in a position where you're doing a lot of work.

Tell me about the work that ISIS is doing right now, Speaker 1: Right now, just like any day, we are working primarily with children who are in the custody of health and human services.

These are children primarily from the Northern triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

They are fleeing violence.

They are fleeing countries that have been broken by this pandemic by the natural disasters that took place last year, the busiest, uh, hurricane season in the Atlantic in 30 years that hit these countries.

And so we were working with these children as we have done now for many, many years.

Uh, what we're experiencing right now is a particularly acute moment, as we all know, it's a very serious situation primarily for the children, um, that are currently, uh, having to deal with having fled a dangerous place, navigated their way here to the United States.

And now they're wrapped up in this enforcement regime that has welcomed them here in the United States.

Speaker 2: And specifically here in San Antonio at the Coliseum.

Have you been, have you been there?

Speaker 1: We are not providing services, uh, at the Coliseum racists is the subcontracted legal services provider for all of the unaccompanied children that are in health and human services custody here in San Antonio, as well as Corpus Christi.

We're also working at the Carrizo Springs location.

Uh, that was recently set up.

We have not been asked to provide services at the Freeman Coliseum, uh, at this time.

Speaker 2: And you wrote a very powerful opinion piece.

Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Speaker 1: We've been working with unaccompanied children and really all immigrant children across the state.

Rice is, is from San Antonio based in San Antonio, but we have offices in the radar of Corpus Christi, Houston, Dallas, Fort worth, and Austin.

We work with thousands of children all around the state and what we have a front row seat really as, as to what's, uh, what's going on from the inside.

And one thing that we experience is that in these times of acute need of great need for services for children, we unfortunately see pundits and politicians who have, as you say, use an exploited, the suffering of these children as a backdrop for politics.

And that is what we have been seeing from the Texas governor.

Um, this is not a governor who has ever been friendly to children in Texas, particularly immigrant children.

Uh, his record is not nuanced.

It's not subtle.

Um, it, it's a very affirmative anti-immigrant and anti-immigrant child agenda that he has.

And it's it's really for political purposes.

There's no help that the governor is providing to this situation.

It is to be clear, a very serious situation.

The circumstances in which these children are currently being held, the possibility that there are any victims of assault or other crimes is very serious.

The problem is that the governor is not treating this in a serious manner, uh, going out and doing a press conference, announcing an investigation is not how you start a proper investigation.

That's how you start a new cycle.

And it appears that that's all that the governor was, was really trying to do.

Speaker 2: So tell me how you think we can improve this process.

So if somebody is watching this and says, I want to help, what do you suggest that they can do?

Speaker 1: Well?

We need to recognize our own agency as the people who ultimately determine the policies of this country.

And so we need to, to, to speak with our elected officials, we need to make our voices heard.

I think it's really critical that people understand that there's a certain wag, the dog that's going on right now.

Um, what is happening is that there are children who are coming to our country from three very particular countries, as a result of very particular circumstances.

This is not about our nation's immigration policy.

As it relates to the rest of the world.

We have a very particular relationship with these three countries that are walking distance from where we are now for children.

We need to pay attention to the fact that these are some of the most places on earth for children to be, and that they're coming here looking for help.

They're not asking to be politicized, they're asking for help.

And that's what we need to provide to them.

We absolutely have to change our relationship with these three countries.

If we want to see it change to the continued arrival of refugees from them.

Um, this is about our relationship with these countries.

And to be clear, we have a very exploitative relationship with these countries.

We take a lot of their resources for our use, be it, their land for our Palm oil and our crops, their coastlines for our tourists or their people for our way, for our low wage workers.

And then we need to take a look at our immigration laws.

It's very interesting to note people talk about how children and people come from these countries because of the poverty there, let us note, the second poorest country in the entire hemisphere is Nicaragua, and it is located contiguous with these countries.

It is right there.

We do not see children or many immigrants coming to the United States from Nicaragua, as we do from these countries.

Why is that?

Well, the last time that our country passed any meaningful pathway to citizenship was in 1998.

And it was for people from Nicaragua.

Whereas some people will use this activity at the border as a reason to stall or push back, uh, opening a pathway to citizenship for immigrants and undocumented people living in this country.

The truth is the opposite.

It's the fact that we have not had any meaningful immigration legislation, any opportunity for advancement to permanent residence and citizenship for the people of central America, that we are seeing this happen.

Right, Speaker 2: Right.

And us here in Texas, right?

We are on the border.

We see, uh, we see a different view than the rest of the country.

So what would you want the world to know about what's going on here?

Speaker 1: The world needs to know that what is happening here is not necessary.

We are the most powerful richest country in the history of this world.

And we are currently considering a crisis to be the arrival of children, to our border seeking help.

We have the resources and the people in place who have actually been doing this for many years.

There is an entire part of our government that can reunify children with their families and set them on the road for success.

Speaker 2: And I, and I, and I, I hear you, Jonathan, and I know that's exactly what we all want to do, and I'm unfortunately have to cut you off here, but Jonathan, you have been wonderful.

Thank you for being here with us today and thank you for sharing your passion with our viewers here at KLR and on the record.

So thank you for being here.

Thank you so much.

Our next guest is Jenny Hickson with Metro health.

We are so happy to have you here.

Thank you for being here with us today.

Thank you for having me.

Absolutely.

So listen, the news has been covered with all kinds of topics about gun violence.

President Biden actually made an announcement specifically about that.

Can you tell us a little bit about what Metro health is doing to address that?

So Metro health about two years ago started, um, we started an expansion of our violence prevention program.

Prior to that we had, that was called the standup essay program, which is, um, really the gold standard public health violence prevention program around gun violence.

It's based on a model that was developed in Chicago by Gary Slutkin, who's an epidemiologist to think about violence from the perspective of how it spreads among groups of people like a disease.

And so we started care about, we started stand up about seven years ago now, um, two years ago when we saw the alarming report and the status of women about the very high number of women that are killed in San Antonio by their male intimate partners in 2018, we were the County with the highest rate of women murdered by male intimate partners.

We developed the comprehensive domestic violence plan, which then developed the new section.

So we were about 15 people over the summer.

Um, I think that there's two things that have happened.

One is that for the first time, in my long career in public health, people know what public health is.

Um, and so there was interest in sort of what could we do as a public health department around violence and the ongoing conversation that we're having about what is violence in our communities and how do we address it in ways other than law enforcement?

So we received a big, um, vote of support from the city and our program is now going to end up being about 65 people.

We're going to be the largest violence prevention section in a health department in Texas.

And we have, um, folks, we have doubled our standup teams.

Um, there were 20 civilian CRT advocates that were moved from SAP into our program.

We have case managers when you're running a hotel.

Um, we have all sorts of different things that we're doing.

And all of this is tied together through the lens of trauma informed practice and care.

So thinking about how violence is an outgrowth of trauma, and we're treating the disease over here, which is violence, but we have to address this root if we're ever going to get away from it and how those are a cyclical relationship that when people experience violence, it's traumatic and that increases their likelihood of perpetrating our experience more violence in the future.

So if we don't interrupt that if we don't help people heal, um, we're not going to be able to ever really get a grip on the violence that's happening in our communities.

So You've had this department for a while and you've been working on improving it and making it better specifically with what's going on now in the country, what your department unique.

I think it is that approach that we're taking about, um, trauma informed from birth through adulthood.

So there are a lot of violence prevention programs that focus on what I would call the high risk model, the identify those people in the community that are at high risk for having something terrible happen to them.

And they really focus their resources on that.

And that's important.

And we do that too, but we also are my marrying that sort of day-to-day experience with victims, with policy approaches that are big picture that are upstream, that are looking at how we change the way we as a city think about trauma and the way that all of our institutions approach that.

So we're doing that through the South Texas trauma-informed care consortium, which is a part of our program, as well as through the triple P parenting program, which is, again, it's a gold standard program used in 32 countries, um, that has been shown to really impact the experience of child abuse in a community.

And we know if we can keep kids safe, we keep them from experiencing violence as adults.

So how are you measuring that success?

What does it look like especially now?

So we are, well, that's a good question cause we're ramping all these things up.

And so we're thinking about that a lot.

Um, we are getting ready to look at how we can do an evaluation with the community that will ask what does safety mean to you?

And I think a lot of times when we think about safety and we think about how we measure violence, we really only measure it in crime.

And we measure it in sort of these statistics that are really sort of law enforcement.

And for us, that's too late and that's after bad things have already happened.

And also we know that a lot happens in our community.

That's very harmful.

That's very violent that never is going to be on anyone's official radar.

And so our question to the community is, you know, do you feel safer?

Do you feel, and safety includes not just physical safety, do you feel, um, do you have economic safety?

Do you have housing safety?

Because the things that we know cause violence in our community are not just a person holding a gun.

A lot of times there's somebody holding your paycheck and not paying you enough.

Right.

And that's a lot of things.

It is a lot of space for trying to keep it small, you know, not, no, we Have a really big vision for where we want this to go.

Wonderful.

And a lot of really good information.

So how are you working with local organizations and communities nonprofits to get that information out?

So we work very closely.

We have a lot of fabulous, uh, nonprofit partners.

We work with communities in schools on providing therapy in schools for children that have experienced violence in the home.

Um, we work with family violence prevention services on all their just amazing services that they pride to provide to the community.

We work with the peace initiative.

We work with my brother's keeper.

Um, I mean, we really work with a lot of the different groups with triple P. We're working with a basket of, um, I think now 12 different nonprofits to get that out into the community.

Because again, I think, you know, me from the health department, I'm not the best messenger.

Um, you really want somebody that you trust that, you know, that's in your neighborhood every day to talk to you about this.

And so we are really thinking about, you know, how do we put these messages in partner with people who have those relationships built around trust to have these hard conversations because they are hard.

And so you have to have trust before you can have them.

So what type of activities to stand up essay do in the community?

Well, Santa Fe is amazing.

They're, um, they're incredible stories like to talk about the great work they do, their violence interrupters.

And so what that means is that when there's a shooting, when there is, um, a murder that happens there right now, they have a team on the East side, we're standing our West side team up.

Um, they actually respond to that on scene.

Um, they go out and they, um, work with the people who are around that shooting.

You know, the family members, the friends, and they try to stop the retaliatory violence.

Because what we know is that most homicides that happen in our city are in two baskets.

They're either domestic violence and family violence.

So things that happen in the home among people that are related, or they are these retaliatory shootings that are among again, people that know each other and there's something that has happened.

And so when that one shooting happens, it's the idea of contact tracing around violence.

So we all know what that is now, right?

So if you have person a who gets shot, they have all the people around them who care about them.

And now these people are angry and they're looking for justice.

And if they don't think they can get it through the official channels, they're going to get it their own way.

And so what the violence interrupters do is they go out and they try to mediate those conflicts and stop them from becoming violent.

So they are out on the street, they're monitoring hotspots.

Um, they do a lot of talking to young kids and they're all people that are what are called credible messengers.

So they're folks that are from the neighborhood.

Most of them are justice involved.

They've spent some time in jail and they can say, I can tell you from experience, um, that, you know, you don't want to do this, and there's another way to go.

And I'm here to talk to you, not as somebody who's telling you what to do, but as someone who's from your neighborhood, who's in your neighborhood, who cares about you as a whole human being and you don't want this.

So it's, I think it's a really, um, it's a profoundly different way to think about how we treat violence as understanding that it comes violence as an outgrowth of pain.

And we have to engage with people on what that pain is before we can stop the violence.

And that does take all those, that connectivity that we're talking about to connectivity.

And I heard, I see you have a lot of support in our city.

So tell me about that.

What does, how does that feel now?

So it's a really wonderful thing that people are sort of understanding now what public health violence prevention can do.

Um, I think we want to be really mindful to grow in the right way.

Um, because we, we want to build a program that's going to last for a long time because we know these issues, excuse me, they aren't going to go away quickly.

Right?

And so we want to build programs that are embedded in community that are responsive to community that are not just, um, you know, I know you mentioned the Biden administration, there's a lot of funding.

That's going to be coming into the community.

And we're trying to be really mindful of partnering with organizations and picking funding opportunities that are consistent with the vision that we have around this issue.

And don't pull us into being something that we don't want to be.

We want to stay with this vision of trauma informed whole person centered, um, relationship based prevention.

Um, and that's, that's sort of the way we're trying to evaluate all these opportunities.

Wonderful.

Well, Jenny, thank you so much for being here and sharing that information.

And I know our viewers are excited to hear about it.

Thank you for sharing.

Thank you for having us.

welcome to the reporters round table.

We are so happy to have you.

We have Gilbert Garcia, a columnist with San Antonio express news.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

So listen, we're still dealing with the pandemic.

We still have a lot of things that are going on right now.

And one of the issues coming up with this pandemic is the city has been having to deal with infrastructure issues, um, you know, dealing with how any type of business is going to continue to operate.

And you have an article, a column about the open records request with the city.

Tell me a little bit about that.

Speaker 1: One of the concerns that people have had people who were really follow the issue of transparency are concerned about, um, how the pandemic has affected, uh, handling of open records.

Um, early on in the pandemic last April attorney general, Ken Paxton issued, uh, guidelines telling state and local government officials.

You know, you can kind of suspend your normal practices when it comes to open records.

Cause under the Texas public information act, uh, government entities have like 10 business days to either re to respond, you know, either to provide information or to, uh, get an opinion from the attorney general, if there's a legal question and he said, we're going to suspend that.

Now, if you have people working from home instead of the office, or if you have a skeletal crew, uh, those don't count as business days.

Okay.

So they got a lot more time and there've been some concerns.

Uh, Greg Brookhouse who's running for mayor filed an open records request last July, basically wanting information about communications within the mayor's office because Greg Brookhouse was opposing the propositions on the ballot.

Uh, and he wanted to know more about what was going on in the mayor's office.

Uh, and he went about eight months.

Didn't get any information.

He went public with that and threatened to Sue the city a couple of weeks ago.

The day after that they started providing some of that information.

Uh, at the express news, we had a situation where last June, um, the, uh, the son of fire chief Charles Hood, uh, was arrested at the airport on suspicion of, uh, uh, having a fake ID and providing false information to police officers.

And we had a reporter at the express news who filed open records requests over a period of six months, and wasn't getting the information and, um, you know, finally the report ended up being expunged and, uh, reporters that the express who's got, the information is kind of winning around that process, but there've been some concerns about that.

And so I, I did a request with the city just to get him from statistical information.

And there've been, uh, there are currently more than 10,000, uh, requests that are still pending, that haven't been resolved.

And nearly two thirds of them nearly 7,000 have been, were filed with the city more than a month ago.

So they so mean, I think the city would say there's been a backlog because of the COVID situation and they're trying to catch up, but obviously some people are concerned that they, that, you know, things have had dragged on too long.

Speaker 2: Right.

Well, looking at what it looked like last year at the same time were, were, were there a lot of open records at that time?

Are we comparing, is this, do we, are we really looking at it because of the pandemic and maybe that was the bottleneck?

Speaker 1: I think the, I think that has been the bottle.

I mean, there have always been some issues.

I mean, I've, I've a colleague at the express news who filed a request in, in January of 2020 before the pandemic really hit and he never got a raise, you know, he never got the information he requested.

So there, there issues that you'll hear about.

Um, but I think that, uh, it's, it depends that MC has, has exacerbated the problem.

And also one thing that was interesting that I found out from the city, which I didn't know until recently, is that the number of open re open records requests they receive has gone up a lot in the last few years, they've got about seven, 8,000 in 2013, I think last year was more than 50,000 for, so for whatever reason, they're just getting a lot more requests to, Speaker 2: So what do you see can be a fixer for that?

What can they do to try to maybe decrease that number?

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that, um, you know, I don't know what the answer would be to put more, you know, personnel dealing with it.

Cause it is, it is, there are a lot of manpower, uh, hours involved in it, but I think that has to, to be the key thing.

And I think that one of the things that they dealt with with the broadcast situation was that they were a lot of documents involved and they generally don't like to do it releasing information in a piecemeal fashion.

They want to give it, put it all out at once.

I think in this case, after Brock house went public, they decided to put out just parts of it.

Uh, that might be the way to go.

If you have a really huge request to provide some information and continue putting out more as you go.

Speaker 2: Huh.

And so why, why should the public care about public records?

And Speaker 1: I think that it's, it's, it's critical to know what, what our government officials are doing.

Um, I think we need, you know, transparencies is, is critical.

And, um, we just, um, at, at every level of government, we need to be able to know what our officials are doing.

Speaker 2: And do you think technology might be something that might help with them?

Speaker 1: Yeah.

One of the things that's been interesting is that they have now, uh, it used to be a situation where, um, if you went to a, a city council member, if there was a request for a city council member at city staff would ask that council office, do you have any re uh, information that's consistent with this request that that's applicable?

And, you know, if they said no, that it kind of stopped there.

So we don't, we didn't know if they actually were providing all of it.

Now, the city staff, uh, has basically because they've upgraded their technology, they have, they can do keyword searches and they can get into all the information they want to.

So they, um, it, I think that has been a helpful thing, but, uh, again, w we're looking at a backlog right now.

Speaker 2: Interesting.

Okay.

So I know that they're going to work on that.

And hopefully now that COVID-19 is we have a little bit more of a grasp on it, you know, maybe that help, but, you know, we, we all have to figure out what's going to happen with the city and we're all excited to see what's happening there.

So you wrote, have another column.

And in your other column, it's talking about prop B, tell me a little bit more about Speaker 1: Right.

Uh, fix SAP D the grassroots organization that got a proposition on the ballot, which would repeal collective bargaining for police office police union in San Antonio.

We'd have to go to a different process, whether it's meet and confer some other pro uh, negotiating process.

Um, and, uh, you know, obviously the police union is very much opposed to this.

Um, polling suggested that it's really pretty close.

And I think that fixed SAP got a big boost on Monday because former mayor who Leon Castro, uh, released a video in which he expressed his support for fixed SAP.

And he, he, he framed it in a way which, which is pretty consistent with how they framed it, which is we're not anti-police we support the police.

We think they should get paid well and have all the equipment, whatever they need get good benefits.

But, um, Castro made the argument as they had made that the collective bargaining process is broken too much leverage for the union.

And so we're not able to get the kind of reforms that they'd like to see.

Yeah, Speaker 2: There's lots of debates coming up and there's lots of discussions Speaker 1: Early voting starting next week.

So early Speaker 2: Voting starting next week.

And there's some positions that are going to come along with this initiative as well.

Right.

I'm sorry.

Some new, uh, police department, uh, positions that are actually going to come in, I think, 20 new positions that are, um, going to come out and it's going to be something that they're going to focus on with property.

Is that correct?

Yeah, Speaker 1: I think, well, I think w w the, the real thing would be, is to try to get to, uh, a process where we can have, you know, all the, all the reforms, as far as the way the police chief can deal with, uh, police misconduct.

You know, for example, the police chief now, uh, has to, within 180 days of an incident if after the 180 days passes, they can't, they can't do anything about it.

They there's, uh, an effort to try to change that.

So it's a hundred, 880 days from the time that the chief or officials find out about it.

So things like this that will make it easier, um, to deal with incidents where police officers across the, Speaker 2: And it's polling pretty well among the community.

Speaker 1: It's, it's down by five points in the Bayer facts poll, which we recently saw, which I think was closer than some people thought it was going to be.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Well, Gilbert, thank you so much for being here with us today.

It's been a pleasure and thank you for that information.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you for spending time with us on this edition of, on the record.

You can watch the show again online, or hear the podcast@kaylaand.org.

I'm Tuesday night.

We'll see you next time.