San Antonio, TX

The San Antonio Police Department (SAPD) presents one of the most striking actuarial anomalies in the PoliceRiskIndex dataset: the seventh-largest city in the United States, with 2,514 sworn officers and a population exceeding 1.4 million, has documented only $1.57 million in civil settlements for police misconduct over the decade from 2013 to 2022. That figure - obtained through a public records request by the San Antonio Current - produces a daily accrual rate of approximately $429, the lowest of any large city in the national index by a substantial margin.

The two largest documented settlements both occurred in 2022. The estate of Jesse Aguirre received $466,300 - the highest single payout in the dataset - after Aguirre died in 2013 when three SAPD officers pinned him to the ground for more than five minutes following a vehicle accident. The Pima County Medical Examiner ruled his death a homicide caused by positional asphyxiation. The case took nearly a decade to resolve, in part because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in 2021 that the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity. The family of Antronie Scott received $450,000 after Scott, a Black man, was fatally shot by Officer John Lee on February 4, 2016. Lee said he believed Scott was holding a firearm; Scott was holding a cell phone. Lee left the department in 2020 and was never criminally charged.

The low historical settlement total does not reflect an absence of high-profile incidents. In 2022, SAPD Officer James Brennand shot 17-year-old Erik Cantu multiple times in a McDonald's parking lot; Brennand was fired and charged with attempted murder. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump filed suit on behalf of the Cantu family. In 2022, Officer fired after shooting 13-year-old AJ Hernandez - the second civilian killed by the same officer within two years. Both cases were pending as of the 2023 data cutoff and are not included in the $1.57 million total.

For insurance underwriters and actuarial analysts, San Antonio represents a critical baseline jurisdiction. The gap between SAPD's historical settlement record and its pending case pipeline illustrates the lag between incident occurrence and fiscal settlement that characterizes police liability exposure. The city has no consent decree, no federal pattern-or-practice investigation, and a powerful police union that historically negotiated strong qualified immunity protections into collective bargaining agreements. The pending Cantu and Hernandez cases, combined with the arrival of nationally prominent civil rights attorneys Crump and Lee Merritt, suggest that the 2023–2026 settlement trajectory may diverge sharply from the 2013–2022 baseline.