Video of officer’s outbursts triggered 2,000 complaints
Report says that Yuen’s aggression toward protesters produced nearly 90% of filings
SAN JOSE >> The outbursts of a San Jose police officer toward George Floyd protesters last summer — video of which went viral and drew international notoriety to the city — prompted nearly 90% of public complaints made to the city’s civilian police watchdog in 2020, according to a new report.
The Office of the Independent Police Auditor received 2,271 complaints about police conduct last year, according to its annual report released this week. More than 2,000 of those mentioned the actions of Officer Jared Yuen during the demonstrations on May 29, 2020, the first of more than a week of contentious protests over the police killing of Floyd in Minneapolis.
That afternoon, as the protests were growing in size, Yuen was recorded by multiple people aggressively manning skirmish lines downtown, yelling, “Let’s get this (expletive)” in one instance and, in another, telling a protester, “Shut up, bitch.”
The department confirmed that Yuen is still with SJPD in an administrative role that doesn’t entail contact with the public. The department declined to comment further, including on the status of an internal investigation launched after the video of his comments went viral. Yuen declined to comment for this story through a police spokesperson.
The videos of Yuen were viewed tens of millions of times on social media and made him the face of a protest response that elicited national condemnation and was heavily criticized locally because of police tactics including the use of rubber bullets and tear gas to break up crowds in the following several days. The department initially defended Yuen but walked that back and put him on leave after a rapid public backlash.
South Bay civil rights groups repeatedly called for Yuen’s firing in the aftermath, so his continued tenure with the department bewildered them.
“When people think about the police vi
olence on protesters during the George Floyd uprisings, the image and sound that comes to mind is Jared Yuen spitting his venom and being abusive,” said Raj Jayadev, cofounder of Silicon Valley DeBug. “The fact that he’s still getting a paycheck from the public and is still on the force is indicative that the San Jose Police Department doesn’t take seriously the concerns of the community.”
He added: “They may try to keep him away from public eye, but as long as he’s on the police force, he’s a representative of the values, culture and direction of the police department.”
Yuen is also named as a defendant in three protest-related federal lawsuits against the city and police, including a suit in which civil rights attorneys are seeking class-action status for protesters. In two of them, he is directly accused of firing rubber bullets at demonstrators — Derrick Sanderlin, who was hit in the groin while trying to deescalate a standoff between police and protesters, and Tim Harper, who was shot in the stomach not long after helping carry an injured officer to safety.
The IPA complaint ratio was repeated in protest-related complaints made directly to the police department through its Internal Affairs unit. An after-action report released last September indicated that Yuen accounted for 1,079 of 1,247 of those submissions at that point.
It is unclear how many, if any, of the people who filed complaints with the IPA also filed complaints to the police department.
Not all of the IPA complaints involving Yuen were generated locally; anyone can file a complaint with the IPA’s office about a San Jose police officer’s conduct, and submissions are accepted by email and online. Because video of Yuen’s hostility was so widely shared, many people from out of the area who saw the footage filed complaints.
After consolidating duplicative concerns — primarily involving Yuen — into a single complaint, the agency tallied and reviewed 269 police complaints last year with a range of allegations that encompassed excessive force, officers not wearing face coverings, and assorted procedural violations that historically comprise the largest share of complaints.
That total marks a 25% increase from 2019, but complaints are still down 8% from 2016, when 292 complaints were made against the department. An accompanying report on internal investigations into complaints initiated within the police department reveal that 46 internal conduct complaints were made in 2020 — down from 61 in 2019.
A key recommendation made in the report by Shivaun Nurre, the city’s independent police auditor, is the creation of a system where an administrative investigation is initiated when an SJPD officer is named in a lawsuit, specifically in cases alleging misconduct by officers. That would serve as a backstop in cases where a person might not file a complaint with the IPA or IA and only file a civil lawsuit, which at the moment would not automatically kick start an administrative investigation under the department’s current policies.
Police controversies last year also prompted a recommendation by Nurre to establish a clear department policy governing officers’ use of social media. That appears to have been inspired in part by a scandal last summer, in the wake of the protests, in which four active officers were put on leave after they were found to have made racist, Islamophobic, and other disparaging remarks in public Facebook posts and a defunct SJPD alumni group on the social-media platform.
According to law enforcement sources, one of the officers was fired, one was given a suspension and two were not disciplined, though one of them opted to retire rather than return to the department.
“Given the prevalence of social media in today’s society, it would be prudent to have a policy so that officers are provided clear guidance about their use of social media on and off duty,” Nurre wrote.
Influenced in part by the scandal, the police department updated its duty manual in March addressing officers’ “personal online presence,” barring the posting of defamatory, derogatory, and sexually explicit material and sensitive information.
The update language states that officers “are free to express themselves as private persons online but may not engage in speech that adversely reflects upon the department, impairs the working relationships of the department, or inhibits the department’s ability to operate efficiently and effectively.”