Opinion: How to make San Jose the safest big city in America again
Improving public safety requires a focused approach and strong leadership.
Preserving public safety is the most critical duty elected officials fulfill. The daily experiences of San Jose residents and its workforce, as well as available data on crime and law enforcement, reveal the extent to which our city’s safety must be improved — and improved quickly.
City audits show that the police department failed to meet its response time targets for its highest priority calls in every single policing district. Violent crime has jumped 50% in the last eight years. Incidents of rape have risen 170% since 2013.
When I left the City Council, San Jose was the safest big city in the country. We can be a safe city once again — but it requires a focused approach and strong leadership.
As a councilmember, Matt Mahan has failed to prioritize public safety. Rather, he has continuously passed the buck and cast blame on others. His City Council vote in June to add just 20 more officers this year and 15 more annually won’t reverse a staffing crisis that costs San Jose taxpayers a staggering $45 million in police overtime annually. Mahan’s approach is too little, too late.
San Jose must, instead, embrace the leadership model Mayor Susan Hammer demonstrated when she created the Mayor’s Gang Prevention Task Force — build an action team, tightly focus our efforts and resources, and pursue targeted initiatives aimed directly at restoring San Jose’s safest-big-city title.
These initiatives include:
1. Hire more sworn officers. San Francisco has one officer for every 400 residents; San Jose has less than one per 1,000 residents. Our officers are overworked and unable to effectively police a city of 1 million residents. San Jose must hire 50 more officers each year for the next five years, recruiting the best and brightest from our own community — officers from San Jose to protect San Jose. By fully staffing our police department, we can offset overtime costs that have drained $225 million from city coffers in just the past five years.
2. Deliver the right response for each call for service. Violent criminals require a response by sworn officers. Troubled people who have weapons or are a threat to themselves or others can benefit from a response including police and non-police professionals. As county supervisor, I supported the Psychiatric Emergency Response and Mobile Crisis Response Teams to make such staff available. People who simply have mental health issues can receive aid from a non-police response that includes counselors and peers with shared experiences. San Jose must collaborate with the county in these efforts.
3. Join forces across jurisdictions to remove guns from the wrong hands. San Jose must better partner with the district attorney to create multi-jurisdictional law enforcement teams and dedicated police units to utilize existing red-flag laws to confiscate guns from people legally prohibited from having them.
4. Clean up neighborhoods plagued by blight. Studies have shown conclusively that targeting blight and neglect has immediately and dramatically lowered violent crime rates. San Jose leaders must focus resources on neighborhood pockets overrun by illegal dumping, graffiti, overgrown vegetation and abandoned vehicles.
5. Expand activities for youth and teens. San Jose must also provide young people with more after school, evening, weekend and summer programs, including sports and midnight basketball, in conjunction with increasing hours at libraries and community centers. And city leaders must expand partnerships with local schools to address absenteeism and expand mental health services to better serve our youth and their families.
Only by working strategically and collaboratively will we affect real change and make San Jose the safest big city in America once again.
Cindy Chavez represents District 2 on the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors and is a candidate for mayor of San Jose.