San Jose extends police chief applicant deadline

City hopes to fill the position by the end of February

San Jose has extended a key deadline in its national search for a new police chief, suggesting the city is not satisfied with its current pool of candidates and wants to draw more outside applicants to vie for the role of top cop in the nation’s 10th-largest city.

The prolonged application window marks a notable contrast from when the last chief, Eddie Garcia, was appointed four years ago without conducting a broad search, continuing a nearly 50-year streak of the city picking an SJPD veteran for its next police leader.

The application deadline, which was set to expire on Dec. 31, was pushed out two weeks to Jan. 14, city officials confirmed Tuesday.

In an email announcing the new deadline, City Manager David Sykes told members of the police department that the extension would allow “additional potential applicants more time to complete the application process after their holiday commitments.”

“We are committed to assembling the best possible applicant pool for this position, and we believe that extra time will allow for the best outcome,” Sykes wrote.

The city says it has completed nine virtual meetings and is surveying community members to gather input for the search. While the city waits for more applications to come in, Sykes’ Chief of Staff Lee Wilcox said the city is finalizing its plan for the rest of the interview process, aiming to name a new chief by the end of February.

Recent SJPD Chief Eddie Garcia announced his retirement from the department in August and by mid- October, the city had launched its search for his replacement. Late last month, Garcia was named the new police chief in Dallas, a city that has the country’s ninth-largest city population and a police department three times the size of that in San Jose.

San Jose has contracted

its national applicant search to Public Sector Search & Consulting — a recruiting firm run by former Martinez police chief Gary Peterson, which conducted the Dallas search that led to Garcia’s hire there.

The firm, which has been in touch with potential applicants, recently recommended that the city extend its deadline to give more time to those who were considering applying but got side-tracked by the holidays, Wilcox said. He called it an issue of “bad timing,” though the application window had been open since Nov. 30 — nearly a month before the winter holidays.

Wilcox would not disclose how many internal and external applications the city has received nor if any had already been deemed unqualified.

Two sources close to the matter, though, said the deadline extension came from concerns about a lack of interest from qualified outside candidates — a plight that’s not new for San Jose but comes at a time marked by resounding calls for change in police departments across the country.

Garrick Percival, a political science professor at San Jose State University, says that San Jose has struggled before to attract outside candidates for key roles due to its high cost of living, financial restraints tied to its small tax base and budget cuts that have led to low staffing and funding levels for a city of San Jose’s size. On top of that, in this particular search, San Jose had to compete with other big cities as an unprecedented number of positions for police chiefs opened simultaneously across the country.

“It’s a tough environment,” Percival said. “But in San Jose particularly, with its high cost of living and a police force that’s really been starved for funding, that just may not be a super attractive position to attract a big pool of candidates — or enough that the city is comfortable with.”

But given the exerted calls for reform lately, the urge to choose an external candidate may be stronger than during previous searches, Percival said.

“Most big cities and large police departments — when going through a reform process — like to bring in people from the outside who will come with a fresh voice and that don’t carry some of the baggage from potential internal disputes within the department or city,” he said. “It doesn’t guarantee success by any stretch but we see this a lot.”

Several internal candidates from Garcia’s command staff are believed to be applying, and the past half- century of city history suggests a strong pull toward a department veteran. Joe McNamara, the iconic police chief who pioneered community policing in San Jose, was the city’s last truly outside police chief, having come from Kansas City in 1976.

Lou Covarrubiaz, a career San Jose officer, succeeded McNamara, who was followed by William Landsdowne, another SJPD top commander who left to lead Richmond police before returning to be chief in San Jose in 1998. Five years later, he was succeeded by Rob Davis, also a career SJPD officer, who served until 2010.

The search to replace Davis was the last time an external candidate was a serious contender, when then- Oakland police Chief Anthony Batts was a finalist with SJPD acting Chief Chris Moore, who got the job.

After Moore’s 2013 retirement, a national search did not yield satisfactory outside candidates for city administrators, and the city selected then-Deputy Chief Larry Esquivel to the top post. It was widely known within the department that Esquivel planned to serve two years with Garcia, his assistant chief, positioned to succeed him. This notso-secret plan was affirmed when upon Esquivel’s retirement in 2015, the city chose to forego a national search entirely and appointed Garcia.

For its part, the city’s police union doesn’t seem to be concerned about the city’s challenges with attracting outside candidates.

Since late last summer, the San Jose Police Department has faced scrutiny over its aggressive response to protesters, prompting the department to conditionally ban rubber-bullet use, support granting the independent police auditor with more power and make other adjustments to its policy handbook to allow for further transparency. Paul Kelly, president of the San Jose Police Officers’ Association, believes there are promising chief candidates within the department.

“No matter how far and wide the search is for our new police chief, one does not have to look beyond our department to find qualified and exemplary candidates to continue the progress that has been made,” Kelly said in a statement Tuesday.