Police step up welfare checks on residents
Effort targets possible rise in family disturbances
Balcones Heights Police Cpl. Victor Mata started his shift Wednesday by knocking on the doors of residents who live on Vivian Lane.
Mata, a patrol division supervisor who has been with the department for 13 years, donned two layered homemade masks and a pair of gloves as he started his visits.
Jack Burton, a former Place 3 City Council member and mayor pro tem, was listening to music when Mata knocked.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come by,” Burton said, greeting Mata like an old friend. Burton told Mata he was preparing to venture out for groceries later that day.
Mata’s visits with residents, many of whom he is already familiar with, are a new duty prompted by a concern from city leaders that stay-at-home orders placed throughout the state would cause an increase in
family disturbances.
Balcones Heights Police Chief John Jahanara said the city has yet to see any sort of increase. Instead, things have been much quieter, much like the traffic along Fredericksburg Road, which was once a commuter hot spot during rush hour before the pandemic.
In response to the drop in traffic, he was able to shift officers onto the residential patrols. Their new mission is to check in on every home in the city, with each officer visiting at least 10 homes a day.
The Balcones Heights Fire Department also has been checking on residents.
After visiting with Burton and seeing that he was doing well, Mata then walked across the street to the home of Michael Guerrero.
“We understand that with COVID-19, you can’t have anybody over. Some people get a little stir crazy and just want to talk to somebody,” he said.
Guerrero, 67, laughed in response, “We were kind of homebodies even before all this, so it’s not much of a change for us.”
Mata said that he often visits with Guerrero’s 91-year-old mother while on patrol and that she has many stories to tell. He thinks making visits like this is a great way for new officers on the force to get to know the residents.
“Ultimately, the residents are what makes the department,” Mata said. “They see things we don’t, and trust me, the residents are good at calling when they see a vehicle or anything suspicious going on.”
Other municipalities have enacted similar efforts to check on their populations.
In Windcrest, Chief Darrell Volz said the city implemented a program for family members to have police check on elderly relatives living in the city.
He said several elderly residents also have signed up to have an officer stop by and check on them at a scheduled time.
“A lot of people don’t have people to talk to,” Volz said. “We send the same officer to allow them to become accustomed to the officer.”
Leon Valley Police Chief Joseph Salvaggio said their department has an officer assigned to each neighborhood who makes welfare checks there, as well. It’s a way of building community relations, he said.
“They’ve gone out and picked up medicines for seniors, picked up groceries for them,” Salvaggio said. “They’ve gone to houses to change light bulbs … stuff that they couldn’t do themselves.”
In Elmendorf, Police Chief Marco Pena said both the city and police are checking on elderly there and making sure people still have food.
“There’s a church that brings boxes of food, and we use that as an opportunity to check that things are OK,” Pena said.