San Jose needs moral alignment of its budget priorities
San Jose has yet another chance to reimagine policing and public safety to make our community truly safe — and by the look of the city's proposed fiscal year 2023 budget documents, it's already failing.
After the racial reckoning that began in 2020 with the murder of George Floyd, after the launching of a muchlauded city-community partnership to reimagine public safety, and after the revelation of numerous San Jose Police Department scandals, it is shocking to see city staff and council members submit budget proposals that significantly increase policing and police surveillance — while not making any meaningful new investments in prevention and intervention. Without a budgetary commitment to change, the city's talk of increasing public safety is morally bankrupt and out of touch with the needs of its most impacted citizens.
We demand a moral realignment of our city's budget priorities. We appreciate that this budget has added resources to address the needs of children and those who are unhoused and that it has continued at least some, though not enough, ongoing support for pandemic relief and recovery. But while some council member proposals include worthy one-time grants addressing community needs, there is only a token amount ($800,000) set aside to address the recommendations made by the Reimagining Public Safety committee. And the city's historic modest investment ($2.5 million) in youth violence prevention and intervention systems is not slated to receive any meaningful increase. By comparison, the policing budget is nearly half a billion dollars.
San Jose police do not need to be called upon to solve every crisis our community faces. Officers have unnecessarily been made the first responders for people in crisis, when we know that other professionals are more qualified to respond to mental health crises, for example. In the same way, funneling police into schools and communities of color doesn't increase safety but just perpetuates individual and generational harm and trauma.
This spring, political candidates have deluged residents with mailers designed to scare voters into wanting more police rather than demanding the resources that will prevent crime in the first place. Recent proposals to incarcerate more people, put forward by some members of the City Council, make it seem as if our current relatively stable crime rate is out of control. Such fear-inducing tactics are morally wrong. They stoke the paranoia of those who already have access to life-enhancing resources. They do nothing to protect the members of our community striving to thrive in the face of ongoing racial and economic barriers. We demand that our City Council work for the dignity and equity of all by investing in real solutions for public safety.
To make communities safer, the research shows that investments in drug treatment, mental health support, educational completion programs, preschool and summer jobs for youth and supportive interventions for families in crisis have all proved to be less expensive and more effective than increasing police presence and surveillance. The vast majority of people in San Jose agree. According to the People's Budget Survey conducted this spring by San Jose State University's Human Rights Institute, over 72% of San Jose residents support the city adopting non-police approaches to managing mental health crises, traffic safety, school safety and the needs of the city's unhoused population.
If the city is serious about improving public safety, then it must invest in communitybased prevention and intervention — doubling or even tripling the current modest proposal. It's a drop in the bucket of what we're spending on policing, but it will do more to create a vibrant, equitable, successful community than policing ever will.