San Jose: Carnage in America’s ‘safest big city’

San Jose: Carnage in America’s ‘safest big city’

Small-city crime, big-city slaughter

by Junya

On June 30, the U.S. Census announced that San Jose, self-proclaimed “Capital of Silicon Valley,” replaced Detroit as the nation’s 10th largest city. San Jose leaders bombarded the media with boasts that bigger size “puts us in a very distinguished class,” according to Mayor Ron Gonzalez. We are not supposed to notice that Detroit’s 85 years in the U.S. top 10 clearly have not served its residents well. Presumably, San Jose’s leaders have greater, world-class ambitions: to ascend to the “very distinguished class” of the most populous cities of India.

In the midst of their celebration of the destruction of the environment to make way for more of the mind-numbing plasticized sprawl that modern population growth brings, San Jose leaders took the time to again remind us that San Jose is also rated the safest big city in America (the same study ranked Detroit the most dangerous U.S. big city).

But, predictably, leaders never mention the flip side of that statistic: despite San Jose’s relatively low rate of violent crime, San Jose has a disproportionately high number of shootings by police. According to a Washington Post study of the 50 largest local law enforcement agencies during 1990-2000, San Jose police averaged 2.5 fatal shootings per year and thus ranked:

l #1 in rate of fatal shootings by police relative to the overall murder rate. That means that if you’re murdered in one of the 50 largest cities, the likelihood that your death resulted from a police shooting was highest in San Jose.

l #14 in rate of fatal shootings by police relative to the overall violent crime rate. That means that while in most other cities fatal police shootings are associated with violent crime, in San Jose fatal shootings by police persist despite a lower rate of violent crime.

l #19 in rate of fatal shootings by police relative to the number of sworn officers. That means that San Jose’s average “kill-per-cop” was among the tops in the nation (nearly the same as Detroit’s).

All this data merely supported common knowledge: for many ordinary residents – already struggling under San Jose’s triple burden of high living cost, extreme income inequality and rapidly declining quality of life – instead of increasing safety, the police have become a formidable threat to life.

Has the situation improved since 2000? FBI crime data shows that violent crime continues to decrease in San Jose, as it does in other U.S. big cities. San Jose’s homicide rate remains about the same, despite heightened fears of “gang” violence.

Yet San Jose police killed five people in 2004: double their average kill rate during 1990-2000. As a result, my calculations show that San Jose’s 2001-2004 rate of fatal shootings relative to murder and violent crime each increased 31 percent over 1990-2000. The worst got worse.

With violent crime and murders relatively low, why are San Jose police shooting so many people? Compare San Jose with other centers of high-tech.

Look at Boston, which also maintains a low homicide rate. Its rates of fatal police shootings were at or near the lowest for every measure of the Washington Post study. Human Rights Watch wrote in its report on police brutality in the U.S.: “Although there have been incidents of serious misconduct and brutality, the department is not a notoriously abusive one. As several observers have stated, Boston’s 2,300 sworn officers usually seem to abide by an ‘unwritten rule’ that limits how rough they can get without attracting media attention and community outrage.”

The police in another Wild West center of high-tech, Austin, Texas, also tend to conform to that city’s low homicide rate by managing to contain their brutality to non-fatal attacks. So what’s going in San Jose?

In a nation firmly rooted in “white supremacy,” anyone seeking to understand police behavior must look at the demographic data. According to Census 2000, San Jose is the only one of the three cities where non-Hispanic Euro-Americans (“whites”) are clearly a minority: 52.9 percent in Austin, 49.5 percent in Boston, but only 36 percent in San Jose.

Yet the percentage of Africans police killed in San Jose was four times their share of the population. Hispanics had a 42 percent higher share of the fatalities than of the population. Is it a coincidence that “white” minority rule in San Jose is served by a police force whose killing is not only out of proportion to the rate of murders and violent crimes, but also disproportionately deadly to certain “non-whites”?

Some observers have long pointed out that there is no police oversight board of any kind in San Jose. All complaints of police misconduct are investigated by the San Jose Police Department’s Professional Standards and Conduct Unit, formerly known as “Internal Affairs” (a name that stated its mindset all too well: “Ain’t Nobody’s Business But Our Own”).

In 1993 San Jose established the Independent Police Auditor, an independent agency with a single director and staff, in defiance of popular demand for a true oversight board. The auditor can sit in on questioning during the investigation phase but cannot question. The auditor can recommend policy or procedure changes, but the recommendations are not binding. The auditor does not discipline police and cannot appeal the chief’s decisions.

Former ACLU Police Practices Project Director John Crew called the auditor model the weakest of all police oversight models. He pointed out that even if every officer in LAPD was interviewed following the Rodney King incident, and all stated that the officers involved in the incident acted correctly, the auditor system would be unable to change the finding. Predictably, the auditor initially met with resistance from the former San Jose police chief and the police union, but received increasing support once the auditor’s ineffectiveness was well established.

It seems that, like Boston, San Jose’s police abide by an ‘unwritten rule’ - but one that has spawned a legacy of unchecked callous disregard for human life. In short, perhaps police kill more often in “America’s safest city” simply because they know they can get away with it.

This is the first part of a series. Watch the Bay View for more about police murder and brutality on the Peninsula and in the South Bay. Email Junya at junya [at] headcity.com.