Gun traffickers, shooters targeted
Priority Gun Offender program aimed at arresting, disarming wanted suspects with repeat gun offenses
SAN JOSE >> With San Jose’s violent crime on a continual climb in contrast to national trends, police and prosecutors have launched a new plan to make a dent on the issue by arresting the city’s worst gun offenders before they get a chance to commit another shooting or put another illegal gun on the street.
Through their Priority Gun Offender program, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office and San Jose police have teamed up to determine which wanted suspects — based on histories of violence, gang affiliation, drug and gun trafficking, or all of the above — deserve the most attention from authorities.
“We want to go after the offenders most responsible for gun violence,” San Jose Police Chief Eddie Garcia said. “Someone who’s armed, who if we don’t get him, is likely to commit another shooting. This is what stops violent crime in a city: targeting violent offenders who have shown a propensity to use firearms.”
It’s a step up from what officials said had been the previous practice of going after gun crimes and gun possession primarily through gang enforcement and making patrol stops. Though that practice has lead to seizures of illegal guns, with aggravated assaults still rising, they decided they had to do more.
“We collectively acknowledged these realities. San Jose is outpacing the rest of the state in gun violence,” said supervising Deputy District Attorney Marisa McKeown, who heads her office’s Crime Strategies Unit. “We embraced the urgency of the situation. We need to be smarter and more collaborative about prioritizing gun crime.”
In San Jose, aggravated assaults — considered by experts to be the best barometer of a city’s street violence — rose 13% in 2019, with 2,517 reported incidents. The total also marks a 39% increase since 2013.
It’s a trend that has fueled a violent crime rate in the city that increased 34% in the same time frame, to 437.3 incidents per 100,000 people in 2019.
San Jose still has crime rates far lower than other large cities in the country, but the trajectories have been concerning for authorities.
Under the new program, the DA’s Office and McKeown’s unit serves as a sort of air traffic controller for the MERGE (SWAT) and other special operations teams in the Police Department — an acknowledgment of the elevated danger of the work — by studying criminal histories, ballistics analysis and other evidence to decide which of the scores of wanted gun offenders in the city are likely to strike soon.
“We’re being more surgical, and targeting the right kind of criminal activity,” Garcia said. “We’re starting to focus on utilizing our data that we have to identify the criminal behavior that is leading to shootings.”
The behavior Garcia references isn’t limited to those suspected of shooting people. Another aim of the Priority Gun Offender program is to identify people manufacturing their own firearms, often dubbed “ghost guns” since their homemade origin makes them untraceable.
Officials have broadly described the yields of the new initiative, which began getting off the ground in October, that includes the seizure of assault rifles and illegal drugs and arrests of gang members with violent histories.
“This is our gun control: keeping guns out of the hands of people legally prohibited from owning them,” Garcia said.
District Attorney Jeff Rosen said given the trends of violence in San Jose, there is no time to waste.
“We will not wait until there are bodies in our streets. We are not waiting until an innocent person is caught in a crossfire,” Rosen said in a statement. “The San Jose Police Department and my office are using our combined forces to do everything we possibly can to stop shootings before they happen.”