Six Reasons the San Jose Reimagining Police Task Force Recommendations are Seriously Flawed

The San Jose Reimagining the Police Task Force report was submitted to San Jose City Council on 4/28/22. The Council referred the report to the City Manager for budgeting and operational considerations and to the City Attorney for legal considerations. The Council did not vote to approve or reject the recommendations. Some of the recommendations would require ballot measures to be approved. Staff will follow up with an analysis of the recommendations contained in the Reimagining Public Safety Community Advisory Committee Report in fall 2022.

I find many of the Reimagining Task Force’s recommendations to be misguided, dangerous, and uninformed.

Here’s why: fundamental to the Task Force’s approach, is to address crime by replacing badged police officers with citizens from other professions, or just regular community folks.

To me, and to many public safety experts, this is a very misguided approach and would lead to the deprofessionalization and decentralization of our public safety efforts. In turn, these recommendations could open the door to huge accountability problems and potentially more crime and violence.

So I’m opposed to many of the Reimagine Task Force’s Alternative Safety Responses recommendations. I’m for more highly trained police officers, more foot patrol, more strict citizen oversight, more MCAT.

Here are my six biggest issues with the Task Force’s recommendations:

1.) The membership in the task force was biased from the start.

This group appears to have been hand-selected with a clear agenda. The 31 voting members represented specific nonprofit special interests and there were no supportive police or other like-minded community safety organizations present. The police chief was a non-voting member, as was the office of the district attorney and public defenders office. We need more policing experience to vote or interject realistic problem solving from a law enforcement perspective. We need the perspectives of: victims and public defenders, probation officers, and assistant district attorneys. And we need the voices of neighbors and small businesses. This exclusion and limitation on community voices, taints and severely impacts the effectiveness of any recommendations of the committee as being discriminatory.

The Re-Imagining Policing Report is missing critical voices. Without radically inclusive input we will lose valuable historical, transferable information on how to be better. Without an experiential foundation, a comprehensive list of dangers to officers and residents, and an understanding of the full ramifications of legal liability for community members who respond to crises under this report — this report should not go further.

2.) The recommendations which invite non police professionals to handle mental health incidents on their own are misguided. There are two areas of concern.

First, One of the most disconcerting recommendations in this section is the proposal that the City invest in training residents and neighborhood groups “on how to address and deescalate mental health crisis situations themselves”. This places an undue responsibility on residents and exposes them to potential negligence claims as well as potentially placing them in immediate danger and imminent harm. Encouraging the community to step in and handle a mental health crisis is reckless without extensive training and certifications.

Second, the concept that mental health professionals can manage incidents with mentally ill people independent of police officers is misguided. Mental health professionals are useful in these situations but require the police to secure the situation and protect the person in distress and those sent to help. I’ve been a mental health professional. I worked in a triple-locked psychiatric hospital. And I can tell you definitively that no mental health professional wants to be responsible for handling criminal activity coming from a 911-call.

In fact, the Task Force takes this troubled idea even further, by suggesting that the City invest in training the public and neighborhood groups in crisis situation even beyond mental health — “on how to deescalate (general) crisis situations themselves, support neighbors in distress and reduce reliance on police response”. There are any number of crisis where it is not appropriate for a neighbor to respond with just a few hours of crisis training. This is a dangerous ploy for the community and puts them at risk of physical harm and negligence claims.

The definition of mental health crisis or general crisis, which would require a community member or non-professional police response to 911, is vague and left up to interpretation leaving victims, attackers, bystanders and good Samaritans in harm’s way.

3.) The task force forces responsibility for emergency situations on to a slow-acting federal bureaucracy.

Diverting 911 calls to the national 988 behavioral crisis response system is another flawed approach to emergency situations. When a resident of San Jose deems it necessary to call 911 they want an immediate response from the City not a delayed response from the federal government.

It’s possible this section suggests that each call into 911 should be evaluated (by the 911 operator) to decide what kind of response should be dispatched based, not only by the nature of the call, i.e. fire, medical emergency, violence, theft, but according to whether there is a mental health issue (#1 and #2), an unhoused person involvement (#3 and 4), domestic violence (#9 and #10) and “lower-level calls” necessitating only a community service officer (#11). The decision tree for deciding how to respond to an immediate cry for help becomes cumbersome, unwieldy, and dangerous for the community as the response to an emergency is further delayed.

4.) The task force transfers traffic enforcement to an untrained bureaucracy — inviting more dangerous roads and traffic injuries and fatalities.

Traffic calming measures and increased community engagement on how to reduce speeding and reckless driving are critical since we have already had so many traffic fatalities in SJ. But the Department of Transportation cannot enforce this: The DOT are not sworn officers dedicated to enforcing all traffic laws. Placing the responsibility for training and law enforcement solely on DOT will have deleterious effects and increase traffic fatalities.

One of the most dangerous service responses an officer performs in the line of duty, is a traffic stop and hoping the DOT can come up to speed, be able to protect the public, and be fully supported to protect themselves is not logical and not safe for the community.

Currently parking enforcement done by community officers with limited scope - is what the SJPD already does to make sure that the community is receiving the best service.

#5: The Task Force recommendations would make gender-based violence potentially more dangerous.

Gender-based violence calls are again one of the highest potentially dangerous calls our police respond to, in service to our city. Providing alternative law enforcement to gender-based violence should not be the first response to a domestic violence (DV) call. “Designing teams to safely intervene in incidents of DV” will result in response delays and further harm to victims and those responding to these calls. Currently when a DV call is received sworn officers respond. If all parties are safe and there is no criminal complaint, the MCAT (mental health arm of the police) are called in to help provide de-escalation and direction to other services provided by the City and County.

#6: The “high risk violation” standard is vague, unclear, and dangerous.

Community service officers responding to lower-level calls for service might make sense as we clearly define what is a lower-level call. Issuing parking tickets and towing illegally parked vehicles are great examples of successful community policing. Additionally, the section suggests that police should not be involved in low level traffic offenses, just “extremely high-risk violations.” These definitions are not clear and neither the officers nor the public will know how to respond when they first need to decide if it’s low-level traffic situations or extremely high-risk traffic situations. Additionally, there is a wide area that has been completely left undefined between low level and extremely high level with no decision as to who responds to the calls in between low and extremely high.

But limiting SJPD to ‘extremely high-risk violations’ leaves a wide swath of traffic enforcement left to other untrained agencies. Combined with eliminating pretextual traffic stops altogether, without guidelines (such as in LA), means another layer of public safety has been removed. Adding “reliance on traffic as self-enforcing” which has not been working to date as seen by the number of car accident deaths and pedestrian fatalities, means another layer of public safety pulled. It is the combination of these recommendations that will have a dramatic negative impact on traffic saefty.

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