Police foot-patrol presence is increased
Overtime beats join heightened community vigilance to deter potential anti-asian attacks
Walking among shoppers purchasing jewelry and stores selling religious statues, Vietnamese snacks and more, San Jose’s newly minted Police Chief Anthony Mata bumped elbows and passed out police badge stickers to patrons at the city’s Grand Century Mall on Saturday as part of an outreach effort amid a rise in anti-asian American hate in the Bay Area and beyond.
“We need to get out to our community,” said Mata, adding that foot patrols in the area have been increased. “Especially right now, we know there’s a lot of angst, fear, with our Asian community.”
Mata was joined by Mayor Sam Liccardo and Councilmember Maya Esparza for the tour through the popular mall in the city’s majority Vietnamese Little Saigon community.
Their presence sent a powerful message to Sam Ho, who said he would like to see monthly meetand-greet sessions from the Police Department.
“When people who are in charge of our safety take the time to come, it shows the community
they care,” he said.
For the past year, police captains in the city’s four patrol divisions have had the discretion to deploy officer foot patrols, on an overtime basis, as a sort of rapid-response teams to address quickly burgeoning crime and quality-oflife problems identified by residents and business owners. Lately, it appears that they are being dispatched to provide an added sense of security for Asian American residents who are worried about randomly timed attacks because of their ethnicity, both real and perceived.
“The purpose of the foot patrols is to be a visual deterrent to crime, while addressing quality of life issues, and as a tool to connect with our community, including residents, business owners, and visitors to San Jose,” police spokesperson Steven Aponte said in a statement to this news organization. “The other factor to all of this is that we are sensitive to the increase in violent and racist crimes against the AAPI community nationwide. Having these foot patrols be visible helps make all members of our community feel safer.”
In the city’s historic Japantown district, Gene Yoneda, the longtime owner of Minato Japanese Restaurant, said he is grateful for the extra attention.
“I welcome it. I can’t believe all the things you see on the news, especially with the elderly,” Yoneda said. “The presence may deter some people (from attacks). If it makes people feel safer, I’m all for it.”
Last month, civic leaders in Japantown began enlisting volunteers for a community patrol, to bolster a thinly stretched police department by having citizens serve as eyes and ears for potential agitators, with a visitor-friendly approach that doubles as a way to let people know they’re watching what’s happening in front of their storefronts and gathering centers.
Ho, in Little Saigon, said those kinds of groups can be a valuable resource for the police officers, but the department has to build up that trust and communication with regular contact, not just one-time visits.
“You want to engage the community and enlist their support because you can’t be everywhere at all times,” Ho said.
Mata said he appreciated the unique community knowledge those citizen groups offer, but said it’s important that they don’t put themselves in harm’s way. He’s planning to meet with the Japantown group to see how his department can work with them, he said.
Rising anti-asian violence across the country, fueled largely by debunked causal links between Asian countries and COVID-19, had simmered since the start of the pandemic but ascended to a boiling point since the beginning of the year, reaching a tragic peak with a string of serial spa shootings in the Atlanta area that killed eight women, six of them of Korean and Chinese descent.
The Bay Area has been the site of several highprofile anti-asian attacks, with instances in Oakland and San Francisco garnering national attention and prompting a broader movement to get both authorities and Asian communities — which encompass a multitude of different ethnic identities — to more expressly and openly address and acknowledge why crimes against these populations have been underreported and by extension underinvestigated.
San Jose has not been spared from startling attacks, chief among them a hate-filled sexual assault of a Filipina woman at Diridon Station by a man who reportedly hurled racist profanities while he thrashed her, before bystanders intervened. But there has also been a rise in attention to lower-intensity encounters, including one this past week in Los Gatos when a Filipina medical worker was shoved to the ground while she was walking down the street, reportedly by a hate-spewing bicyclist who told her to go back to China.
At the Grand Century Mall, business owners and patrons brought up the rise in anti-asian American incidents and hate crimes, as well as a string of car break-ins, purse snatchings and other burglaries. Mall owner Lap Tang said he’d like to see “more officers come to the area to deter criminals.”
That was a sentiment Liccardo said he heard from shop owners and patrons during his visit.
“It’s a time in big cities where there are complex relationships between the police and communities,” he said. “We’re hearing overwhelmingly from the community they want more police, not less.”