SAN ANTONIO - The Bexar County Sheriff said his jail officers are so over-worked, he fears one of them might get hurt or worse.
That's why Tuesday at a news conference; Sheriff Amedeo Ortiz announced he needs a larger jail staff.
In the fiscal year 2011 county budget, a hundred sheriff office positions were cut – saving taxpayers more than $4-million.
Ortiz invited the director of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards to the news conference where the director expressed his concern about the future of the Bexar County Jail.
“We are trying to emphasize a safe and secure facility,” said Director Adan Munoz. “Eventually this facility will not be safe and secure for inmates and detention officers if it’s run at the current rate.”
Munoz said based on the state’s staffing analysis, Bexar County needs at least 26 additional uniformed officers to run the jail.
Ortiz said he needs 92 more to run the jail efficiently. This would increase the uniformed jail staff from 830 to 922.
County Commissioner Kevin Wolff said the problem is not the number of officers, rather it’s how the jail is being run.
“It is the sheriff’s job to manage the jail,” said Wolff. “He’s got more than enough staff to do that. I can argue whether he is doing a good job managing the jail, but he has more than enough staff to do it.”
Wolff argued despite the call for more jail officers, the Bexar County Jail still past its most recent state inspection.
Ortiz said that was only possibly due to mandatory overtime.
The Sheriff said the overtime has taken a toll on his staff - leading to the early retirement of three jail officers in just the past week.
“The only way that we passed the inspection is we used a lot of mandatory overtime - so much that we burned out the officers,” explained Ortiz.
The county manager has recommended that the Commissioners Court hire a third-party expert to help come up with the most efficient way the staff the jail.
