CLICK HERE if you’re having trouble viewing the slideshow on your mobile device.
SAN JOSE — In the wake of the death of George Floyd at the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, law-enforcement leaders across the country were climbing over each other to denounce it, breaking from their long-standing convention of being silent after abhorrent police killings.
San Jose police Chief Eddie Garcia helped start that chorus, tweeting Wednesday: “What I saw happen to George Floyd disturbed me … The act of one, impacts us all.”
The Bay Area’s three largest police unions, never shy to close ranks, described the Minneapolis officers’ acts as “failures.” Chiefs rushed to reassure their communities of color why this wouldn’t happen to them.
But Garcia has more than pointed rhetoric. This week, SJPD posted its latest data study on use of force, highlighted by findings that between 2015 and 2019, San Jose officers have lessened the severity of force they use during combative arrests, and that racial disparities have largely flattened out.
“We wanted to get better,” he said. “Everyone expects me to say those things, but it’s the officers who responded by believing in de-escalation and putting themselves on the line. That’s how we’re moving the needle.”
The force data analysis was conducted by Washington-based Police Strategies LLC, which built SJPD’s online use-of-force dashboard, and is run by former Seattle Police Department staff involved in the Department of Justice investigation and federal consent decree to address systemic abuses in police force and racial bias in Seattle.
The latest study — an inaugural report came out two years ago — found that in 2019, the department brought racial disparities to within a tenth of a deviation of what would be deemed even-handed deployment of force, when measured against arrests. According to the data, analyzed in conjunction with Seattle University, SJPD officers were 2% less likely to use force on black and Hispanic people compared to their arrest rates, 5% less likely to use force on Asian and other non-white people, and 11% more likely to use force on white arrestees.
It’s a notable shift: In 2015, when the department resumed gathering granular data on officers’ force, Hispanic people were 11% more likely to see force used on them compared to their arrest rates, and white people were 18% less likely to experience a use of force. In 2016 and 2017, black people being arrested by San Jose police were 19% and 13% more likely to experience force used on them, respectively.
In 2019 SJPD recorded 642 use-of-force incidents — about average for the past five years — involving 528 officers who used force 1,355 times.
The study’s other major finding was that the severity of force by officers had lessened, corresponding with a significant drop in the use of weapons like batons and night sticks, in favor of tactics like grappling and wrestling. In 2019, San Jose police officers decreased impact weapon use by 53% from 2015, from 194 instances to 92.
The trade-off, however, has been a rise in injuries: In 2015, officers were injured at a 21% rate, a figure that was 25% in 2019. For the arrested, their injury rate rose from 57% in 2015 to 66% in 2019. Police Strategies CEO Bob Scales said that has occurred against a backdrop in which officers are encountering more people in mental-health emergencies, and are more frequently carrying weapons.
The study does state that injuries suffered are less severe. The turn toward wrestling and other hand-to-hand tactics has prolonged violent encounters, increasing exposure to injury. San Jose police have tried to close that gap by instructing officers to more frequently wait for backup before engaging, for a swifter and less contentious arrest. Force incidents in the presence of three or more officers rose from 41% to 55% from 2015 to 2019.
Garcia credits much of the change to an array of initiatives instituted by the department since he was named chief in 2016, including crisis intervention and implicit bias training. He stressed that the number of use-of-force incidents and arrests made — more than 17,000 in 2019 — were on a par with previous years, indicating the officers changed their behavior rather than decreased their activity.
Last year, he partnered with San Jose State University to pilot academy graduates through a “history of policing” course that took them from the profession’s early roots in slave patrols and and into the modern era with the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
On Friday, in that same spirit, the chief visited the current SJPD academy class to talk about George Floyd, who died Monday after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin subdued a handcuffed Floyd — arrested on allegation he tried to pass off a counterfeit $20 bill — by kneeling on his neck for several minutes. Chauvin was fired soon after and was charged with murder Friday.
The recruits were shown a heart-wrenching video of Floyd’s arrest, and Garcia and Pastor Jason Reynolds of the Emmanuel Baptist Church in San Jose told them how it will affect them.
Garcia sought to relate to his audience by recalling he was a police recruit when the 1992 Los Angeles riots broke out over the acquittal of the officers who savagely beat Rodney King.
“Hopefully polarizing moments in American law enforcement won’t happen for you often,” he said. “This tarnished our badge, and made your job harder … It was a cowardly act.”
Reynolds told the officers-in-training that they have to take to heart police tragedies that didn’t even involve them if they want to reassure the communities they will soon be tasked with protecting.
“The pain that sits in communities of color, African Americans in particular, it is so amazingly deep,” he said. “They don’t get the same ability to be forgiven for their mistakes. A counterfeit $20 bill? Why does that need four officers? Unless already built into it is worry and concern of the individual.”
Bob Nuñez, a vice president of the San Jose-Silicon Valley chapter of the NAACP, has been involved in earlier programs to school new officers in the historical cloud they take on as soon as they put on the badge. He says training like this is a significant factor behind the findings of the use-of-force study.
“I do like the fact that the numbers are reflecting a downward trend,” he said. “What I believe needs to happen next is to more fully understand why so it can be replicated and duplicated.”
The study provides some standout data points not within the scope of use of force and not analyzed, most notably that black people are arrested at a rate four times than would be expected given their portion of the city’s population. Scales said using a population reference point can create outsized figures in small populations, and 3% of San Jose’s residents are black.
Scales said further study is needed to control for factors like specialized enforcement for drug and gang crimes, and out-of-town arrestees. A 2017 University of Texas-El Paso study commissioned by SJPD found that after applying a more precise benchmark based on police report data, black people were were subjected to car stops in San Jose at the twice the rate of white people, but that arrest rates were close to even.
Victor Garza, longtime chairman of La Raza Roundtable de California, said he was heartened by the sheer drop in use of force since 2007 — the last time use-of-force data was routinely collected by SJPD before it resumed in 2015 — from 1,156 incidents that year, more than twice the 2019 figure of 642.
“That’s a great improvement,” Garza said.
Garza also said “there is still work to be done,” and wants to know more about some granular findings in the data study. Chief among them is getting more context for individual officers who account for a high proportion of force incidents. The study stated that in 2019, a 10% slice of officers were involved in 27% of use-of-force cases, highlighted by one officer linked to 15 incidents.
“That tells me they need to look at this guy,” Garza said.
Garcia said he was receptive to the lingering questions of community members.
“This is not the end, we are not claiming victory. We are not perfect,” he said. “My hope is that this report gives my community a sense of encouragement that the great responsibility that they bestow upon these men and women will continue to be nurtured.”
After George Floyd’s killing, Garcia said Minneapolis police needs to similarly scrutinize its use of force, and says it might be time for legislation to compel it more widely. Scales noted the FBI gathers limited national data on deadly use-of-force, but that it’s a voluntary process for police departments.
“The takeaway I took from Minneapolis is that this is probably not the first time something like this happened. The officers were pretty nonchalant about it. It was like, ‘This is what we do,’ ” Scales said. “It highlights the importance of agencies continually monitoring what their officers are doing, to be able to see patterns, and they can’t do that unless they have the data.”
