At the August 19 Rotary Club of San Antonio luncheon, William "Bill" McManus — who retired in July after nearly two decades as San Antonio's police chief, the longest tenure in department history — set aside the crime statistics he normally brings to a civic club and walked members through a 50-year career he never intended to have.
McManus began in 1975 with the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and rose to assistant chief before leaving in 2001, then led departments in Dayton, Ohio and Minneapolis before San Antonio hired him in 2006. A Villanova graduate with a master's from Johns Hopkins, he is now vice president of safety and security for Silver Ventures at the Pearl. John German introduced him.
"I'm going to do something here today that I have never done in all my years as a police chief or a police officer," he told the room. "And that is, I'm going to talk about myself." What followed ran from a Philadelphia row house to the chief's office.
I Never Wanted to Be a Cop
McManus grew up in an inner-city Philadelphia row house — three bedrooms, one bathroom, five sisters, his parents, his great-grandfather, and a basement where he slept. Philadelphia led the nation in homicides for most of the years he lived there. The neighborhood kids played in the alley out back, every day: football, baseball, wire ball, box ball, wall ball, step ball.
Football paid for college. Recruited as a quarterback out of the city's Catholic League, he signed with Virginia Tech, then switched to Villanova, where he started four years at linebacker.
Policing was not the plan. At 22, in Washington to enroll in graduate school, he passed a building giving an open police test and went in on a whim. He passed, forgot about it, and months later the academy called asking when he could start. It started Monday. He went.
The Promotion That Came from Housekeeping
"I studied for detective, because I didn't want anybody getting ahead of me," he said — then sergeant, then lieutenant, on the same reasoning, still waiting for some other calling to arrive.
The promotion he credits most came out of housekeeping. Handed a district whose buildings had gone years without investment, he had the floors shined and walls repainted, scripted how phones were answered, and required desks cleared at each shift's end. Touring it, the chief told him it was the first building he had walked into where it looked like somebody was in charge. Four months later, McManus was an assistant chief.
What the Crime Numbers Don't Show
McManus opened with a point he has made at neighborhood meetings for years: violent crime in San Antonio is down, as it is in most American cities, and the news does not read that way. The first five or six stories, he said, are all red lights and sirens. He asks audiences to imagine a year without watching the news, then say whether they would still wake up believing a crime wave was underway. Rooms tell him no.
He declined credit for the decline. "If you take credit for crime down, you're to blame for crime up," he said, pointing instead to economic and family conditions. He supports license-plate readers and facial-recognition cameras, arguing a driver on a public road has no expectation of privacy, and traced falling respect for officers to 2020 and to prosecutors who stopped charging lower-level offenses.
He closed with an endorsement: Jesse Salame, the assistant chief McManus promoted and now serving as acting chief, is in his view the one candidate who could lead the department without a learning curve. The city expects to name a permanent chief in September.
