Everyone deserves to feel safe in our city. San José has the lowest ratio of officers to population of any large city in the USA. I agree that we need to add more sworn officers and we can be strategic about our investment. The Street Crimes Unit spends about 60% of their time responding to calls about encampments. Many calls to encampments have a mental health component and arrests are not necessary. Street Crimes officers aren’t equipped to handling social service calls. We can fix this problem by investing in and building out the police department’s Mobile Crisis Assessment Team (MCAT). The MCAT unit is trained in de-escalation, negotiation, and crisis assessment. They are better equipped and trained to handle mental health and crisis calls for service. This frees up the Streets Crime Unit to respond to other calls that may warrant a more traditional law enforcement response.

You can read more about my ride along with the MCAT unit on my Medium article here.

We can also reduce the number of calls to the police that deal with code enforcement, traffic, and vehicle abatement. These departments are off-loading their work onto the police. Revitalizing, reorganizing, and holding these departments accountable to their jobs will be critical to our safety success. This is why I will follow up with any open audit recommendations these departments may have or ask the City Auditor to perform an audit on those programs with the goal of improving their service delivery.

An aspect of public safety that is often overlooked is quality-of-life. In 2016, the city launched a pilot program called “Project Hope”. The program dedicated city staff and more resources to the Cadillac Winchester neighborhood in West San José, a traditionally underserved community in the city. The neighborhood received more illegal dumping sweeps, police foot patrols, and other services from City Hall brought directly to the neighborhood. The project was a success. Cadillac Winchester saw a decrease in amount of illegal dumping on their streets and families felt that the city was much more responsive to their problems. The program has since expanded to include even more neighborhoods, including Guadalupe Washington. I know firsthand how important quality-of-life is to a neighborhood. I commit to securing more funding and continuing the program to help downtown neighborhoods.

You can read more about my experiences and policy ideas for downtown on my Medium page here.