This towns police dept has long been an incompetent lot (while not anywhere nearly as bad as say, NOLA or Baltimore, they are still fairly boorish and prone to overreach) and prone to such stellar missteps as how it handled the Floyd protests in town (e.g. https://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/sjpd-maims-activist-who-t...)
I live in SJ, have police in my family, and have talked to police neighbors.
SJPD has fewer officers per resident than any other major city. We have somewhere between 30% - 50% the number of sworn officers as San Francisco. SJPD is underfunded and surrounding cities are all better paying for officers. The officers that continue to work there mostly live many hours away and are required to work pretty high overtime hours.
My personal assessment is California Prop 13 (from around 1979) is at fault. It has starved the city’s funding, which makes SJPD uncompetitive against neighboring cities. Additionally, the city is a residential base for lots of the companies in the neighboring suburbs.
In the late 2000s, the mayor at the time was very worried about the retirement costs of the department and made the comp package much less appealing/competitive for new hires/transfers than existing officers. This creates an exodus of experienced officers and means that we get worse recruits than other cities.
Not trying to justify the unprofessional actions, but to add some factual color behind the recent history that got us to where we are.
Then it begs the question, if SJ is so underfunded and police overworked, how it manages to be a comparatively safer city than other comparable metro areas? It almost begs the question about not needing more Police, but better supporting services adjacent to it to address the things cops aren't trained sufficiently and/or otherwise suited for.
I've known plenty of great LEOs growing up in the area, but I've encountered (especially in the last 20 years) an almost caricatured level of clowns wearing the uniform. It's soured me on LEOs in general, and certainly the police management in SJ as a practical thing. After the utter bungling of the protest handling, including the refusal to fire Jared Yuen and the keystone kops moment with the Sanderlin rubber bullet shooting, it just became impossible to defend this circus.
As far as funding goes, SJPD in recent years got a 41M punch up, so I'm not sure how it's so underfunded.
> if SJ is so underfunded and police overworked, how it manages to be a comparatively safer city than other comparable metro areas?
My personal theory is that crime has little to do with policing and mostly related to how people feel in a society and whether they can meet their economic needs. Throwing money at police departments improves neither unless the department focuses on those ends.
SJPD’s use of Community Service Officers takes low urgency work away from sworn officers for less than half of the cost of a sworn officer and requires fewer trigger-happy people to interact with the community. The numbers I mention are sworn officers, excluding CSOs, so I suspect that augmented force helps each dollar go further.
