“When we came face to face with the cops and their line at Seventh Street, the smoke started coming and [my friend] Joseph continued to stand in the middle and play his guitar,” San Jose resident Joshua Landers said. “Then, he was hit in the face with rubber bullets.” 

On May 29 during a Black Lives Matter protest, San Jose City Hall looked like a warzone as protesters ran through tear gas and officers shot people with rubber bullets. 

“I think the San Jose police were more willing to have violence under their control than to have peace under our control,” Landers said.  

In efforts to de-escalate violence and reform police policies, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo and other city officials introduced a proposal to the San Jose Police Department according to a news release Tuesday from the mayor’s office. 

The news release states that SJPD should share criteria for crowd control methods, examine the use of kinetic impact projectiles (KIP) such as rubber bullets and reform the use of force policies.

“To ensure the reform process is transparent and meaningful, we need to understand where we are starting from,” Liccardo said. 

The proposal came after Liccardo signed the Obama Foundation’s Mayors Pledge, a pledge to review, engage the community and reform police departments’ use-of-force policies. 

The first step of the proposal asks for a report from SJPD identifying what criteria is used to determine when to deploy “crowd control” methods, as well as a recommendation from the department on whether the use of KIP’s should be banned. 

The second step calls for the mayor and city councilmembers to establish a process to review SJPD’s “use of force.” The results of that review will be paired with feedback from the community in order to reform the current policies. 

Meanwhile Liccardo is supporting an effort to expand the role of the Independent Police Auditor (IPA) to have more self-government over “use of force” investigations in the November ballot. 

The news release included that expanding the oversight of the auditor will “go a long way to ensuring Police Officer accountability with input from the community and negotiations with the Police Officers’ Association.”

“I recognize the difficult situation that our police officers are put in every time they answer the call to protect people and property during a protest,” Vice Mayor Chappie Jones said in the news release. “I also recognize that our residents who wish to express their first amendment rights should also be protected from harm.”  

He said police practices have evolved over time and the effectiveness of those practices must be assessed in order to protect all San Jose residents.

The request by city officials came after last weekend’s protests where police fired rubber bullets, hundreds of officers were deployed and 180 arrests and several viral videos were made, according to an article published Thursday by San Jose Spotlight. 

About 300 officers were deployed to downtown San Jose on May 29, roughly 240 officers deployed on Saturday and 400 officers deployed on Sunday according to SJPD Chief Eddie Garcia in a news conference Sunday.

Landers said that police tactics against peaceful protesters continued Sunday, despite protesters being on the designated sidewalks of San Jose City Hall. 

“We were all at City Hall in the designated area for the protests,” he said. “At a certain point, [the police] called it an unlawful assembly and decided to shoot tear gas and loud explosives into the crowd, even though we weren’t in the streets and weren’t causing any damage.” 

Demonstrations are often highly emotional events and officers assigned to the scene need to “strive to maintain an outward appearance of calmness,” states the SJPD Duty Manual. 

The manual read that calmness should be maintained whether the task is to stand by protecting demonstrators or making necessary arrests of violent demonstrators. 

However, in the news conference Garcia dismissed the fact that protesters faced police brutality over the past week in particular. 

“The protests aren’t being met with force,” Garcia said. ”The violence against our police officers is what’s being met with force.”

SJPD Capt. Jason Dwyer said the use of force was authorized to allow officers to defend themselves against the “chaos raining down” and prevent damage to downtown  San Jose. 

“When my boots hit the ground at Seventh and Santa Clara, I stepped into a war zone. That is not hyperbole, that is not in any way embellishment,” Dwyer said, who was struck by a rock at last Friday’s protest. 

Dwyer said he has been a cop for 21 years and spent about half of that time in special operations, but he has never seen anything like last Friday’s protest. 

Meanwhile, Garcia apologized for his reaction to SJPD officer Jared Yuen’s antagonistic actions toward protesters in downtown on May 29 in an interview with ABC7 News Tuesday.

Yuen is being investigated for possible misconduct after videos surfaced over the weekend on Twitter of him verbally provoking protesters and firing a shot from the police line.  

“I do sincerely apologize if I seem cavalier with Officer Yuen’s actions that were on video,” Garcia said.

Most of the 1,200 citizen complaints filed since May 29 were about Yuen, Garcia said in Thursday’s news conference.

Chief Garica had commented about the incident in Sunday’s news conference and said, “I know Jared and he’s a good kid who made a mistake, who let his emotions get the better of him.” 

Garcia said he shouldn’t have said Yuen is a good kid and that at the end of the day, his actions were unprofessional. 

“The officer will be held accountable for his actions,” Garcia said. 

San Jose Independent Police Auditor Shivaun Nurre said the police misconduct process begins with a complaint filed against an officer either by the department or by the public. 

“If at the end of the investigation it is determined that he violated the policy, then he is going to be subject to discipline,” Nurre said. ”Discipline can range from a verbal warning, all the way up to termination.”

She said a lot depends on how egregious the misconduct was and whether or not the officer had past complaints resulting in discipline. 

Meanwhile, the murder charge against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was upgraded from third-degree murder to unintentional second-degree murder,  according to an article posted on Wednesday by NBC News.

“The second-degree charge appears to be appropriate, with no need to prove any intent to kill Floyd,” the article read. 

The charge is accompanied with a maximum sentence of 40 years, compared to 25 years for third-degree murder. 

Greg Woods, a San Jose State justice studies professor, said in a phone interview with the Spartan Daily that right now we are suffering through “a perfect storm of a confluence of factors.”

Woods said on top of a pandemic lockdown and mass unemployment, the current outrage over George Floyd’s death is the spark that created a whole succession of explosions, and that is what we are experiencing now. 

“The police officer is the most tangible, readily accessible member of government that patrols our nation, engages with members of our community,” Woods said. “It is the law enforcement officer that assumes the face of all that is wrong with the system.” 

Woods is a constitutional scholar, law enforcement and legal trend expert who has developed a “first-of-its-kind training model” for law enforcement. 

In response to both violent and peaceful protests that occurred in downtown San Jose, Woods said the right to assemble peacefully is reflected in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, but there are aspects to this right the public should understand. 

“Peaceful assembly is a qualified right . . .  We are allowed to peacefully assemble but there’s a time, place and manner that we can peacefully assemble and be regulated by the government,” he said. 

He said protest organizers need to have licenses to march and permits to be in a particular place and control that particular area in a particular way.

In regards to his law enforcement training model, Woods said when he teaches police about community efforts and community-oriented solutions, he begins with the writing of Plato, where he emphasizes the use of the word “guardian,” not hyper-militaristic paramilitary subculture. 

“When we see what happened in Minneapolis and we compare it with a person who might be outfitted in San Jose with a baton, a shield, rubber bullets and chemical agents and then they respond on camera in a way that is consistent with an occupying force . . . It contributes to the narrative that we are a divided nation,” Woods said. 

He said if we don’t have a unified definition of what professionalism in policing means then we are subject to “inward thinking” throughout police departments. 

Woods said inward thinking is the failure of building credible relationships and trust within the community and the succession of a paramilitary subculture. 

“In law-enforcement there is a thin blue line, on one side of the line you have chaos, on the other side of that line you have law and order,” Woods said. 

He said that while there are checks and balances throughout the police department, there needs to be reform efforts.