Watchdog urges more tracking on use of force

Though public complaints against police are dropping, the city’s chief watchdog for the San Jose Police Department believes more needs to be done and is urging the agency to track in more detail officers’ use of force out in the field and report all instances of possible excessive force.

Use of force issues spearheaded the ongoing concerns in the annual report published this week by San Jose’s Office of the Independent Police Auditor, which showed that public police complaints dipped slightly from 303 in 2015 to 292 last year.That figure does not include cases where citizens filed civil litigation and bypassed the complaint process.

To Chief Eddie Garcia, that drop is part of a broader down-

ward trajectory of complaints that account for just one-tenth of 1 percent of total police interactions with the public.

“I expect them to be dropping,” Garcia said. “We’re working with our community. We have open lines of communication with them so that nothing festers.”

Garcia added that internal figures show that through the first six months of this year compared to the same period in 2016, police complaints filed with the department are down 37 percent, a figure he said includes a 77 percent drop in force complaints.

“We still have room for improvement,” he said. “But this department and these officers are on the right trajectory.”

However, for the first time ever, over half of police complaints in 2016 — ranging from allegations of excessive force to a lack of officer decorum — were submitted to the auditor’s office rather than directly to the police department.

According to the report, complaints originating with the IPA’s office accounted for 54 percent of total complaints in 2016 — a marked jump from the 39 percent the office comprised the previous year. Against a national backdrop of increased public police scrutiny, has a tide turned?

Interim police auditor Shivaun Nurre offers a more sober explanation. She noted how boosted publicity efforts, led in part by recently departed IPA Walter Katz, appeared to have raised awareness among residents about another avenue for complaints besides police headquarters.

“One reason why more complaints come to our office may be that the IPA office does community outreach throughout the year,” she said in an email.

The 2016 annual report was the first and last involving Katz, who left in March to become a mayoral publicsafety advisor in Chicago after just over a year in the San Jose job. City officials say San Jose is taking applications for the civilian oversight post through the end of June, and will begin conducting interviews in August.

In the meantime, the IPA continues its drumbeat for more transparency with use of force. Public complaints about force decreased by 10 percent to 108 in 2016. The police department’s Internal Affairs division sustained — or validated — one complaint involving force.

Overall, the IA division sustained 11 percent of closed complaints last year, up from 6 percent in 2015, though the vast majority of those concessions involved procedural missteps. Revealing the full picture of use of force continues to be a concern for the IPA.

“It appears that of the thousands of use of force incidents that took place between 2010 and 2015, not once did a SJPD supervisor or executive believe that a use of force was questionable enough to justify opening an investigation,” the report stated.

The issue highlights a sore spot for the IPA: Departmentinitiated investigations, or officer complaints flagged within the force, are exempt from the auditor’s reach. An array of officer privacy statutes are at play for that.

A single internallylaunched force complaint was lodged last year, but the availability of surveillance camera footage in that case appears to have been a mitigating factor. The IPA report recommends that the department instill a proactive “affirmative duty” for personnel to report “excessive or unreasonable force.” Other related recommendations include classifying force incidents into three tiers of severity to analyze in greater detail rather than treating them all the same.

Garcia said he is amenable to these suggestions, particularly allowing department-initiated investigations — which numbered 41 in 2016, the highest in recent memory — to be reviewed by the IPA, to ease community skepticism that the department can effectively policing itself.

“We’re moving in that direction. Nobody hates a bad cop more than a good cop,” Garcia said. “We’re taking a hard look at force and policy violations.”

Also on the list of issues addressed by the report are concerns about racial profiling and whether the department’s procedures to assess bias in its policing are expansive enough to effectively detect it. 2015 saw the first sustained bias-based policing complaint in the department’s history, and the bias did not have a racial component.

For its part, the department instituted implicit-bias training, procedural-justice instruction, and body-worn cameras across the force last year, and ordered an analysis by the University of Texas-El Paso’s Center for Law and Human Behavior to assess racial disparities in its traffic and pedestrian street stops.

Other key recommendations in the IPA report included instituting a robust data-based evaluation system for crisis-intervention training to quantify its effectiveness in the field, and implementing an “early warning” system to detect officer misconduct tendencies rather than wait for public complaints, particularly for lesser-experienced officers who disproportionately elicit complaints.