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SAN JOSE — A group of 46 police officers fresh out of the academy reported to a classroom on the San Jose State University campus this spring for an unusual lesson in recent American history. The topic: the cases of citizens whose often-deadly encounters with the police have stirred controversy and fueled national debate.
The names were familiar: Oscar Grant. Michael Brown. Stephon Clark. Eric Garner. Freddie Gray. Rodney King. Cau Bich Tran.
All except King were killed by police officers. Tran, a diminutive Vietnamese woman, was shot to death in her home in San Jose when the officers allegedly mistook the vegetable peeler she was holding for a cleaver.
In the first program of its kind in the Bay Area, the San Jose Police Department and San Jose State have joined together in a novel project to make young police officers more sensitive to how they might be perceived in the community — why the reception they get might not always be so welcoming. The course, “Policing in the Current Political and Social Climate,” consisted of six sessions and was required for all students in the police academy class that graduated in April. This year’s course was a pilot, but the department plans to continue it with future academy graduates.
In the class, the newly-minted officers were reminded of the mortal risks they would face every time they suited up — just two weeks ago, a police sergeant was hit and dragged by a car in the course of a deadly officer-involved shooting — and the vital role they play in emergency response. But they also were told how, historically, police officers have been used as instruments of government discrimination, tasked with enforcing shameful policies such as the Japanese internment and Jim Crow laws.
Much of the course material was presented in the spirited, rapid-fire delivery of Greg Woods, a seasoned lecturer in the university’s Justice Studies department, who zig-zagged from the Enlightenment to slavery to the Zoot Suit Riots to the present, giving the rookie cops a sense of the complicated legacy they inherited the moment they pinned on their badges.
“Everything that came before you sets the stage for everything you’re going to encounter,” Woods said.
He said one major aim of the class is to prepare officers for the unprecedented level of scrutiny they will receive as a direct result of high-profile police shootings, especially the shootings of unarmed black men such as Grant, who was killed in Oakland on Jan. 1, 2009, by BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle. (The BART police department said, in a recently released report, that Mehserle had acted illegally in the shooting.)
“This class is about trust, it’s about transformation, and that can be uncomfortable,” Woods said. “But it’s better to have it in the safety of a nonadversarial classroom instead of having to relive these horrific events on the streets.”
Legal battles continue in California over making police officers’ disciplinary records public and officers’ body-camera footage more readily accessible. Two conjoined legislative bills could change the standard for the use of deadly force by law enforcement officers.
Woods is acutely aware of the skepticism that might greet a police department sponsoring a class in policing history. That is in part why the syllabus addresses one of the most controversial officer-involved shootings in SJPD history, the case of Tran, a mentally ill Vietnamese mother who was killed July 13, 2003. That shooting ignited a firestorm of criticism over issues of mental health and cultural sensitivities, as police, in the absence of adequate mental-health services, continue to be called on as first responders to any mental health crisis. Close to 40 percent of police shootings in Santa Clara County involved a mental-health emergency.
Torlorf Thomas, 24, a new SJPD officer from Montgomery, Alabama, who was one of six black officers in the class, said he is sensitive to what is at stake, given the rich civil-rights history of his hometown.
“It’s hard to tackle a problem without knowing its antecedent. This history opens your eyes up,” Thomas said.
His parents were both law-enforcement officers, but even with his family’s police background, he said he was treated warily by police officers when he was a teenager, in part because of his 6-foot-4 frame and athletic background as a high school and college basketball player.
“I was once with my teammates and an officer pulled his gun on us. We were pulled over for speeding,” Thomas said. “I thought, ‘What is going on? Why are you acting this way?’ ”
The academy class, the department said, was the most diverse in its history. While the vast majority of the graduates — 39 out of 46 — are male, only a third, 16 officers, are white. The rest of the class consisted of 12 officers who identify as Hispanic, with nine Asian officers, six black officers, one Hawaiian officer, one Filipino officer and one officer of both black and white heritage.
Pastor Jason Reynolds, a member of the local advocacy group People Acting in Community Together, was one of a number of civic leaders invited to speak to the class about the community’s wariness of the police.
“I was honest about the difficulties,” Reynolds said, adding that he told them, “Things might seem unfair to officers, but we still need you to police in those situations.”
Thomas said he plans to use what he’s learned from the class and draw from his own experiences to balance empathy with the vigilance needed to perform his job.
“Aggression doesn’t always gain compliance,” he said. In his encounter with the police as a teenager, he added, “The officer was in a rush. There shouldn’t have been a rush. If you’re not patient, how can you expect them to be cooperative? It’s okay to be calm and soft-spoken and mentally still be ready.”
Police Chief Eddie Garcia said the class, which he had been planning for about three years, also is meant to reinforce to the officers that they operate in a national police landscape. He believes that the curriculum, or some version of it, should eventually be standardized for police training, saying that even a 27-year law-enforcement veteran like himself did not have a full grasp of how much American and world history informed current police culture.
“We’re part of the national picture,” he said. “No one reads the city on the badge, you just see the badge. We have to understand why certain segments do not trust us. I hope this scratches the surface of that.”
Jahmal Williams, an assistant director for the university’s Peer Connections program, which helped coordinate the class, acknowledged there was still room for improvement in the course, but he said what was in place already was a solid foundation.
“You have to have a start, and build on that start,” Williams said. “Our next step and our next challenge is to raise the level.”
