More than 30 members of the community spoke out during a San José City Council meeting June 2 in response to the targeting by the San José Police Officers Association of Raj Jayadev, director of Silicon Valley De-Bug, a youth and student activist group.
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Jayadev’s comment included the following: “There has not been a street response to all the news about racial profiling and the alarming arrest rates in San José since [the Mercury News] broke [the story] in October of 2008. What that signals is the community has been very patient. The public has been overwhelmingly patient in hoping that City leadership would step forward and offer a way for us to collectively problem-solve. But, I can tell you right now after having just left a rally outside . . . that their patience is running thin.”
Some sixty people had attended the May 5 rally, including activists from South Bay ANSWER and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Many participants had stories to tell of police brutality, racial profiling and other police misconduct they had experienced first hand. Among the demands raised at the rally were for an end to racial profiling and for a civilian police review board.
Subsequently, it came to light that the SJPOA had inserted a series of hostile, sarcastic and demeaning comments into the video of Jayadev’s May 5 testimony, and was displaying it on the SJPOA’s YouTube channel. View the video
In addition to posting the video, the SJPOA issued a public statement in the name of its second chair, George Beattie, attacking not only Jayadev but also the mayor and members of the City Council who, according to the statement, “the minute they are threatened by any vocal, anti-police organizations, just like those present during the May 5th Council meeting … quickly forget that they were elected into office by law-abiding citizens who overwhelmingly support San Jose police officers.”
He went on to make additional comments in a similar vein. Refusing to use Jayadev’s name, Beattie refers to him as “The Person.”
“The most disturbing part of this episode is that the Mayor and Council sat there silently after The Person threatened them! Pete Constant [a former cop] was the only councilmember to speak up on our behalf. … I commend Councilmember Constant for his courage to vocalize his support for us in the presence of a hostile, anti-police group. On the other hand, I would like to condemn Councilman Chu’s [first Chinese American to be elected to the City Council] behavior for giving a warm welcome to The Person’s group of thugs, several of whom continued to make threatening comments to the Mayor and Council.
“I believe now is the time for Mayor Reed and the Council to decide just exactly whose side they are on,” Beattie ominously concluded.
The entire scurrilous statement, dated June 1, was published on the SJPOA’s Web site under the title “Silent Majority.”
Strong show of solidarity
The June 2 public comment session, which lasted over an hour, was a remarkable show of solidarity. Speaking in support of Jayadev were individuals from a variety of organizations including the Asian Law Alliance, Community Homeless Alliance Ministry, Coalition for Justice and Accountability, San José Cop Watch, San José Peace and Justice Center, Silicon Valley De-Bug and others.
A statement from the SJPJC, an umbrella group and resource center with 17 community affiliates, called upon the City Council to censure the SJPOA and to facilitate public participation in democratic processes without fear of reprisals by the police.
A number of speakers, young and old, men and women, African American, white and Latina, offered moving personal stories of being assisted by Jayadev and others at Silicon Valley De-Bug, which they said offered a safe space during difficult junctures in their lives, including in situations that involved encounters with the SJPD.
A statement from “Junya” e-mailed to activists just prior to the City Council meeting pointed out, “If this incident were observed in a fledging republic of the developing world, it would be seen for what it is: a muscle-flexing threat to civilian rule by the military forces of the land.”
According to the local CBS affiliate, the SJPOA hired a professional PR firm to produce the video as a response to Jayadev’s comment. In a report posted on the SJPJC Web site, board member Anu Mandavilli, stated, “Belligerent reactions such as this video only lend further credence to allegations about SJPD’s racist and discriminatory behavior towards members of the African-American, Filipino, Latino, and Vietnamese communities, and many other residents of San José.”
This is an important point. Last year, a Mercury News investigation reported that San José police arrested more people for violating the state public-drunkenness law in 2008 than any other department in California, and a disproportionate number—57 percent—of those arrested were Hispanic.
Critics say that the policy, which does not require a sobriety test, means that many people are arrested simply because police officers don’t like their attitude.
Last year, three men who say they were racially profiled and wrongly accused of being drunk in public filed a $20 million federal civil law suit against the city and police department.
