ALAMO RANCH – A more visible law enforcement presence in Alamo Ranch is what the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office promised residents after they voiced their concerns during KSAT’s Know My Neighborhood series.
“I saw my first motorcycle mounted Bexar County Sheriff deputy today and the mobile command post, [and] the cruisers patrolling,” resident Art Garcia said.
Janie Ruiz also noticed the department’s increased presence.
“Right now, it seems like they’re making themselves more visible than previously,” Ruiz said.
Residents say it’s progress; more BCSO deputies are seen in and around their neighborhood.
Three weeks ago, they voiced concerns about a lack of a law enforcement presence and increased crime.
“Criminals want to find, like water, the easiest way in, so if it’s too tough, they’re going to move on,” Garcia said.
According to the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, from Sept. 31 to Nov. 20, deputies responded to 158 suspicious calls, 70 calls of burglary, 22 confirmed thefts from vehicles and 18 thefts of a vehicle, just in the area stretching from 1604 to Talley Road and Wiseman to Culebra.
“We’re going to take a pretty big geographical area, a big patrol district, and cut it up into several smaller districts, and then instead of just putting one or two deputies in this area, you may see upwards of four, five, or six on a shift,” Sheriff Javier Salazar said.
On top of adding extra deputies to patrol Alamo Ranch, Salazar says that BCSO plans to set up a substation in the area, but a timeline is unclear.
In the interim, the sheriff’s office has placed a mobile substation in the area to allow deputies to respond to calls faster.
“I don’t have numbers in front of me, but I can tell you before we started that operation and then when we started that operation, we were getting in vehicle pursuits with suspected car burglars just about every night; now those are happening a lot less frequently,” Salazar said.
He says the mobile substation has been in the area for the past few weeks.
Salazar also plans on holding more safety presentations in Alamo Ranch. Dates for those presentations haven’t been set yet.