Brass, city laud rebounding force
SAN JOSE >> The San Jose Police Department’s substation in South San Jose has functioned as both a sign of the tough times the agency has endured over most of the past decade, and now as a symbol for what leaders hope will be steady growth.
Planned as a police headquarters for the southern part of the city, a dearth of police staffing meant the $87 million building spent several years completely unoccupied. Over the past three years it has housed the police academy, recruiting and training units.
Friday, department brass and city officials leaned heavily into recommitting to that original purpose, introducing the public to the city’s 54 officer recruits, the largest police academy class in a decade.
With 110 officers in the pipeline to bolster a police force that has struggled to field barely over 900 officers in the past two years — the last time that’s happened since the early-1980s — Police Chief Eddie Garcia stood in the seven-year-old substation’s ultra-modern, light-bathed meeting room and preached hope.
“We’re going to have some conversations in the next six months on how to utilize the substation in the way it was intended … I couldn’t even talk about that a year ago,” Garcia said. “There has been
no bigger symbol of our demise than having this big beautiful building and have it be empty.”
For Garcia, reviving the substation would cap a bevy of plans he has for the incoming manpower help, which includes restoring the breadth of investigative and traffic units and bolstering vice-crime investigations.
Sam Liccardo, who as city councilman and now mayor often found himself at the center of the “strained” political battle over pay, pension and disability benefits that helped drive the department from a corps of 1,400 to its current state, basked in the recruitment news.
“We are here because we’re proud to commemorate the San Jose Police Department’s rebirth,” Liccardo said. “SJPD is back.”
A few hallways down, academy instructor Sgt. Paul Fontaine was giving the tan-uniformed cadets — they get their dress blues after graduation — their inaugural instructions. They sat in a classroom that was originally meant to be a stable of sorts for patrol officers. Rows of desks emanated from the front of the room, and a year ago, when the academy graduated seven officers, they occupied maybe the first two rows.
On Friday, with Academy 30 in the house, nearly all those rows were full. With TV cameras looking on, no doubt adding to the nerves of the new class, Garcia and Liccardo made a show of conveying their value.
“You are joining a great department,” Liccardo said. “You are also going to serve a grateful department.”
Besides bringing in fresh recruits, Garcia restated his intentions to lure back officers who left the department over the past several years out of frustration with the pay and benefit negotiations. Armed with a new contract that will infuse healthy raises over the next three years, Garcia says that mission is slowly coming along, with four lateral hires so far this year, compared to none last year.
“Officers were taken from us,” he said. “I have no bones about taking them back.”
Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen also chimed in, extolling the ancillary safety benefits of a robust SJPD for the broader region given San Jose’s dominant geographical and cultural footprint.
“This will also help relieve crime throughout our county,” Rosen said.
But with all of the optimism being gushed Friday, Garcia added his now-signature brand of pragmatism so as to temper expectations no matter how good the trajectory is. For instance, even counting the recruits, the department is still over 100 short of its authorized strength of 1,109 officers, a number Garcia hopes would have to be raised if and when it is reached.
“We didn’t get into this mess overnight,” he said, “and we’re not going to get out of it overnight.”