S.J.’s police reform committee placed on hold
Civil rights leaders quit, saying it marginalized community role, voices
A touted advisory committee aimed at reforming policing and public safety in San Jose is now on hiatus following the mass exodus of South Bay civil rights leaders who quit in protest after asserting it was too top-heavy and marginalized the voices whose outcry fueled its initial formation.
A coalition of groups headed by the Black Leadership Kitchen Cabinet and San Jose-Silicon Valley NAACP sent a letter Tuesday to the city officials running the City of San Jose Reimagining Public Safety Advisory Board announcing they were leaving after individual leaders started dropping out last week.
The letter detailed their frustration with a lack of consensus that problems like systemic racism, excessive force and inequities in police attention need to be fixed, and their takeaway that the institution of any proposed reforms coming out of the committee ultimately would be steered by the Police Department and the city.
As of Thursday, about a quarter of the 46 group members had stepped down. At a City Hall rally that same day, activist Walter Wilson, who was the first member to bow out, said he was upfront to Deputy City Manager Angel Rios about the ad hoc committee needing to be substantive when it began meeting March 18.
“If this is real, I’ll join this, but don’t waste my time,” Wilson recalled saying. “This is a sham. This is a joke.”
William Armaline, criminal justice chair of the local NAACP and director of the Human Rights Institute at San Jose State University, echoed several leaders’ stance that unlike the existing framework, the advisory group has to be community-centered to be useful.
“We had anticipated a community-led process,” Armaline said. “We don’t need the San Jose Police Department or city manager or anyone else to filter our words. We can speak for ourselves.”
Rios said Thursday that the city is pausing the committee’s work for two to three weeks to “synthesize the feedback” and decide if and how to restructure the group’s objectives, and that he hopes to reengage the members who left.
“We want to be driven by quality conversations that translate into action rather than driven by timeline, even if it means extending the deadline on the back end,” Rios said. “The easy road is to step away from it, but here in San Jose, we’re choosing to confront it … It comes with a cost, but it’s a cost worth paying.”
But the assembly of social justice leaders at the City Hall rally Thursday said that the advisory group has to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Peter Ortiz, a member of the Santa Clara County Board of Education representing East San Jose, said the city needs to significantly rethink whom it includes to make sure that community concerns about policing and safety in the city are meaningfully addressed.
“For the advisory group to be effective and inclusive, the families of those who lost loved ones to police violence need to be centered,” Ortiz said. “The voices of those who have been most affected by state-sponsored violence need to be prioritized.”
The advisory group was conceived late last year in the aftermath of the violent police response at summer demonstrations protesting the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, with the aim of improving police-community relationships.
Rios said he believes the conflict has risen out of differing ideas about the group’s primary goal, which he says is to take a broader look at addressing community safety, not just police reform.
He added that a subcommittee focusing on police reform could result from the review the city will conduct in the next few weeks.
In a city memo issued ahead of the first meeting — there have been three overall — the group is aimed at “engaging the public on the future of police work as it relates to social issues and reducing conflicts that are noncriminal in nature.”
Rios held firm about the role police have to play as a primary stakeholder.
“At the end of the day, we want to have a better relationship between the community and our Police Department, and that doesn’t happen by excluding either of those parties.”
Wilson questioned the wisdom of a process that ultimately ends with the city, Police Department and independent police auditor deciding what to implement, and noted how previous police auditor Aaron Zisser’s departure under heavy political pressure was a big reason to be skeptical.
Zisser said Thursday the controversy should prompt the city to consider more tentpole changes to police reform.
“The city’s cluelessness here just further highlights the need not only for a community-led task force to address immediate reform but for a permanent community-led police commission. The city has commissions and boards on everything else — why not on policing?” he said.
“This is not going to be the last time the city should be thinking about what needs to change — that should be an ongoing process that places impacted communities at the head of the table leading.”
La Toya Fernandez, founder of Youthhype and organizer of Thursday’s rally, called the initial form of the advisory group “wildly offensive” and said it won’t survive without major changes, given the buyin the city needs from the groups that rebelled.
Besides the Kitchen Cabinet and NAACP, the resignation letter signatories included La Raza Roundtable, the Santa Clara County La Raza Lawyers Association, Silicon Valley De-Bug, Somos Mayfair, Ujima Adult and Family Services, and the Asian Law Alliance.