In its never-ending war on panhandling, the San Antonio Police Department has been deploying vice detectives to issue citations for aggressive solicitation.

All through the summer, vice detectives arrested people such as Rafael Alvarado for begging for money and wandering into traffic at busy intersections.

If the goal was to waste lots of time and energy, the tickets were a slam dunk. An analysis of city documents reveals an aggressive campaign against panhandlers — likened to a quota by one expert — that has produced plenty of citations and little else.

Most everyone agrees citing panhandlers is a waste of time. But public pressure to do something, the short-term benefit of moving people out of a problematic area and a lack of other options keep the citations flowing. Meanwhile, a pilot program to steer panhandlers toward treatment has languished due to a lack of funding.

If only we were as aggressive with preventive strategies.

The end result is a story like Alvarado’s. Records show vice detectives cited Alvarado a total of four times in June, July and August for aggressive solicitation. They cited him on July 28 at Northwest Loop 410 and Vance Jackson Road, dragging him down to Municipal Court. The next day, they did it again. Right at Loop 410 and Vance Jackson.

Only 24, Alvarado has been cited at least 81 times for various minor infractions, racking up thousands of dollars in fines that he will never pay.

With so much public attention on panhandling in recent months, the tickets are hardly surprising. After all, as the San Antonio Current recently reported, San Antonio police have been issuing thousands and thousands of quality-of-life tickets a year, aimed at discouraging panhandling.

What is odd about this particular policing strategy, though, is everyone agrees that it doesn’t work.

“It’s ineffective, and it’s always been ineffective,” outgoing police Chief William McManus said.

“That’s the way the whole thing has been for 30 years,” said John Bull, presiding judge for Municipal Court, which gets backlogged with these citations. “If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and not getting a different result, we’re not getting a different result.”

Let’s back up.

Police are facing a lot of different community pressures to address aggressive panhandling, particularly when it undercuts businesses or makes people feel unsafe. This email to city officials from Sherry Chaudhry, owner of Comfort Suites Alamo/Riverwalk on the east end of downtown, captures some of what’s at stake:

“There are concerns in the area of the homeless people and it is drastically affecting my existing business,” Chaudhry wrote this summer. “I am very interested yet concerned about this problem with my plans to expand and develop the area with people living here daily, shops trying to operate and more tourists all being pushed away by the 'homeless’ element that is plaguing the area.”

Complaints like this come in again and again from business owners, neighborhood associations, council members relaying constituent concerns and ticked-off drivers who have been harassed.

“We can’t simply say to them there is nothing we can do about it,” McManus said. “We have to deal with it.”

So, they cite and cite and cite. Or as one city memo from September says, “SAPD has initiated a citywide zero tolerance program on panhandlers and conducts weekly round-ups with arrests.”

How the vice squad fits into this program is a bit unclear. All of their citations for June, July and August came in the last week of each month, a trend that Robert D. McCrie, a professor of security management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said sounded a lot like filling a quota.

“I’m not sure why detectives would do this,” he said. “As a strategy, prevention always works better than brilliant-after-the-fact responses.”

Likewise, Phillip Lyons, interim dean of Sam Houston State’s College of Criminal Justice, said “it does make me wonder what the end goal is.”

The key question, he said, is to “ask people whether the quality of their life has improved as a result of these policing strategies.”

It’s hard to say that’s happened for anyone — the panhandler, business owners or people who are being threatened or harassed for loose change. And yet the citations go on.

Ironically, some of the people arrested give Haven for Hope as their address, a facility to take the homeless off the streets.

More on the end goal in a bit. But first, about those detectives being deployed to nab panhandlers. McManus said vice detectives are perfect for issuing these citations because they aren’t in uniforms and don’t have caseloads.

This might make them effective for writing tickets, but Municipal Court for a panhandler is like circling through a revolving door. The ones taken there loop through it without ever paying their fines because they are indigent, instead getting credit for time served. Factor in transporting and holding panhandlers, or the work hours put into citing them, and it’s downright costly.

One weekly police report from August, for example, noted 38 misdemeanor citations were issued, and 61 man hours were spent checking major roadways.

Perhaps the beat cops don’t like that municipal court recently purged 8,600 quality-of-life citations from its docket, but realistically what is the court supposed to do? Particularly when those citations aren’t uniform. For example, Raul Lopez, 36, has been cited roughly 30 times as a Latin, Hispanic and a white male with three different birthdays.

To help reduce the citation backlog, the court has asked the police to only cite panhandlers once per outing. Instead of multiple violations ranging from public intoxication to disorderly conduct, the police are supposed to be citing people for aggressive solicitation. The thought is that this will decrease the number of citations and outstanding fines.

McManus took a lot of heat — including from me in a column — for proposing citations for those who give to panhandlers. It came across as unkind and intrusive — although SAPD knew it would.

“Please let me know specifically if the ordinance enactment is demanded to be pushed out faster as it will require the public education piece to be accelerated dramatically if we have any desire for the public to not hang us and council,” Capt. Patrick Murnin wrote in an email in August.

But from a police perspective, it was creative. If citing panhandlers doesn’t work, maybe there would be more success citing people who would give to panhandlers? The givers would, certainly, be more likely to pay their fines, right? And if it’s illegal to panhandle in certain areas, then why should it be legal to give in those areas?

McManus received a lot of blowback for this approach, but remember, he has also been praised for innovative police work with the mentally ill population, and many panhandlers are mentally ill.

The department’s “mental health squad,” a six-person unit that responds to calls where a person might have mental illness, has saved taxpayers millions by placing offenders of minor offenses in treatment rather than jail.

In fact, McManus, Judge Bull and a number of other judges and stakeholders have considered a similar pilot program for 10-15 panhandlers, but it hasn’t had much success, if any. The issue? Well, it’s ironic, really, but there is no money for it.

“Who is going to pay for the thing, or where are the beds going to be?” Bull asked.

Maybe then, our priority shouldn’t be more panhandling tickets, but funding this pilot program.

Really, it couldn’t be any less effective or wasteful.

jbrodesky@express-news.net