Editorial: San Jose cops’ troubling use of force with mentally ill

It’s not just the numbers that are disturbing. It’s also encounters, captured on video, that show shocking confrontations.

Thompson “Tommy” Nguyen was undergoing a psychotic break holding an ax and a metal pipe as he walked the grounds of a San Jose power plant. He never raised his arms or overtly menaced police with the weapons. But as one officer yelled “Tase him,” another officer instead shot him dead.

One of the greatest challenges Bay Area police face centers around the increasing number of interactions with the mentally impaired. For police who are trained extensively on how to establish authority and compel compliant behavior, dealing with people in mental crises often requires tapping a different skill set to avoid tragic consequences.

Unfortunately, San Jose police continue to fall back on their instinct to use force rather than looking for ways to deescalate confrontations.

In 2017, San Jose became the first big-city police department in the country to mandate crisis-intervention training for its officers. The training was a condition of the city’s legal settlement with the family of a 19-year-old woman shot dead by police during a psychiatric breakdown.

As a result, police in the city receive a minimum of 40 hours of training and additional ongoing instruction on how to avoid violent confrontations by using deescalation practices. The department says the program is working — the number of cases involving use of force when officers are sent to mental health calls has decreased dramatically since 2018.

But an in-depth investigation published last weekend by this new organization shows that most of the department’s most serious cases still involve the mentally impaired. It’s not just the numbers that are disturbing. It’s also the encounters, captured on video in 46 incidents, that in some cases show shocking confrontations that could have and should have been deescalated.

Of 108 cases from 2014-21 in which San Jose police caused “great bodily injury,” nearly three-quarters involved people believed to be mentally ill or intoxicated. Those 108 cases resulted in police killing 25 people, 20 of whom were mentally ill or intoxicated.

The city had dragged its feet on enabling public scrutiny of these cases. The records used in our investigation were released under California’s transparency laws and the terms of a 2020 settlement of our lawsuit against the city.

To be sure, there are some bright spots in the data, most notably that the total number of cases that involved lethal force declined over time. But there continues to be a troubling number of cases of police violence involving the mentally impaired.

Cases like the one that led to the January 2018 fatal shooting of Tommy Nguyen. Or the May 2021 case of William Wallace, whom an officer tried to stop for jaywalking on a deserted street in the middle of the night.

Wallace was defiant, cursing at the cop and pushing his bike toward him as he walked away. The officer responded with force, chasing Wallace down, pinning him to the ground and punching him multiple times in the face, leaving him with a broken nose and multiple lacerations.

Or the February 2020 case of Sylvester Taylor Gaulden, who was wrapped in a blanket carrying what appeared to be a pillow, apparently undergoing a mental health crisis. Within about 10 seconds of finding Gaulden on a quiet side street, an officer was hitting him with a baton, and another officer was shooting him with a 40 mm beanbag launcher.

Equally disturbing were the claims in one of the officer’s reports that Gaulden was starting to charge at him and had shown “multiple pre-assaultive behaviors.” The video simply doesn’t support that.

We understand what a tough job policing can be. But it’s in those moments of crisis that officers demonstrate whether they can properly balance the need for restraint with the instinct to use force.

However much the San Jose Police Department wants to tout the success of its crisis intervention training, the video evidence shows that it still has a long way to go.