Anthony Mata selected as San Jose’s next police chief.
25-year veteran backed by minority community groups; faced opposition from others on force
Anthony Mata, a deputy chief and 25-year veteran of the San Jose Police Department, has been chosen as the city’s police chief.
City Manager Dave Sykes formally presented his pick to the City Council March 16, which approved the selection unanimously after an hourslong closed session.
“Chief Mata demonstrated his ability to lead policing in the 21st century for the city of San Jose, to build trust with our community, and manage the leanest police force of any big city in the nation,” Sykes said in a statement after the confirmation.
Mata, a Chicago native, joined the department in 1996 and earned a master’s degree in public administration at San Jose State University. As deputy chief, he once commanded patrol operations and most recently oversaw regulatory units and crime data and intelligence. He took over as chief March 22.
“I’m truly honored beyond words and I’m just grateful for this opportunity to lead our exceptional workforce at this time,” Mata told the City Council March 16. “I look forward to our continued work with our community members to make our communities safe and I want to thank everyone for their continued support.”
According to sources and participants in closeddoor candidate interview panels, Mata, who is Latino and bilingual, rated well with community interviewers and also had backing from some of the city’s prominent minority community groups.
“He is part of this community. I’m elated he made it,” said the Rev. Jethroe “Jeff” Moore, president of the San Jose-Silicon Valley NAACP. “The work begins immediately. One of the first things he needs to do is make sure he meets with various community groups, look at internal issues and get a command staff supportive of him so he can do great things for the community and the police department as a whole.”
Mata stepped into the top post amid sharp internal strife in the department, which had fractured its support among the three department leaders on the shortlist for the chief position. In addition to Mata, acting Chief David Tindall and Deputy Chief Heather Randol were among the finalists.
As Mata gained steam, both departmental chatter and old court documents circulated about Mata’s fatal 1999 shooting of an unarmed man, Odest Mitchell, a 48-year-old armed robbery suspect that SJPD tracked to Salinas. The documents included a report by the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office concluding that Mitchell was shot as he ran from officers on a freeway off-ramp and that what Mata and a second officer had said they thought was a potential firearm was actually a pair of sunglasses.
Mata’s critics in the department also called out his role in a 2018 lawsuit filed by an SJPD officer, alleging that he presided over briefings in which other officers had made Islamophobic comments. The lawsuit got renewed attention in the wake of a social media scandal last summer that revealed bigoted Facebook comments made by several current and former SJPD officers.
On March 15, the day before Mata’s selection, ABC7TV reported that retired transgender San Jose police officer Julie Callahan wrote a recent letter to Sykes alleging Mata’s tepid embrace of LGBTQ people, recalling how he was one of a few officers who refused to support her when she transitioned about two decades ago.
Mata denied the characterization and Sykes said in a statement March 16 that the city “immediately” looked into the matter for any instance of discrimination or harassment and that the city “did not substantiate a violation of city policy nor find any reason to disqualify” Mata from being chief.
It should be noted, however, that Callahan did not allege any policy violations in the ABC7-TV report, but was conveying wariness of Mata’s attitudes toward LGBTQ people.
Mata had been set apart from Tindall and Randol as the closest thing to an outsider among the internal chief candidates, a status that gained particular resonance after SJPD’s violent and roundly criticized response to downtown demonstrations last summer in protest following the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.
Community leaders pressuring the city to make good on pledges to reform police and reimagine public safety saw Mata as more receptive to those calls.
Sykes alluded to the intradepartment conflict in remarks he made near the start of the council meeting.
“Now that the decision has been made,” Sykes said, “I’m looking forward to working with Tony and I’m hopeful that we can all kind of come together and work together in terms of the work we want to do with our community in terms of progressing forward.”
Mayor Sam Liccardo said Mata is “deeply committed to his department and he’s going to do a great job.”
He said allegations and issues brought up with Mata recently have been “vetted and discussed extensively.”
“It’s important to understand all of this in the context that there are some powerful groups that are displeased by the selection, and revelations were made at the eleventh hour conveniently around the time that the council is about to make its decision,” he said.
The San Jose Police Officers’ Association said in a statement that it plans to work “as collaboratively and cooperatively as possible with Chief Mata to ensure our department continues to improve our relationships with all members of our community, keeps our residents and businesses safe and addresses our chronic understaffing challenges that have resulted in significant increases to our emergency response times.”
Many in the department blamed the protracted chief search for festering some of the internal conflict.