Chief Davis of San Jose Speaks
[December 18, 2008]

           I attended Council President De La Fuente’s Movers and Shakers Breakfast this morning at the Rotunda Building downtown.  I had to. 

            Just imagine the paradox, the irony… Two Chiefs of Police would be in attendance, both neighbors.  One, the Chief of a city regarded among “The Safest Cities in America,” and the other, ranked among “The Most Dangerous Cities in America.”  Awesome.

            Chief Rob Davis of San Jose, at the podium, didn’t accept the popular rankings.  He poked at New York because it was listed as being safer, and Davis challenged anyone to evaluate that feeling by comparing a walk in the downtown of either city.  He said that the numbers were skewed because Auto Thefts were included, and who owns a car in Manhattan? 

            So let’s have a look at the latest FBI UCR numbers for 2007.  Chief Davis is right.

           
            You will note that New York does indeed have far fewer Auto Thefts, and if looking only at Violent Crimes, San Jose is safer by 53%.  Remember that viewing Property Crimes is highly unreliable because they are variably unreported, misreported, under-reported, and non-reported.  Please don’t look at Oakland in the context of safest cities.

            It is not credible or relevant to compare cities for their property crime experiences.  Some cities (avoiding names) simply don’t respond consistently to property crimes, and either downgrade them, dismiss them, or redefine them.  You can spot these cities by noting when their Chiefs of Police crow about “overall crime rates going down” and avoid commenting on crimes of violence.  One should look at Violent Crime rates in any real attempt to gauge relative public safety or form comparisons.  Even then, one should look at broader secular trends.  This doesn’t mean that there aren’t shenanigans going on with the numbers, but it is much more difficult.  An example might be to look at Piedmont, where a violent crime, any violent crime, might be a major case, but not even get attention in Oakland.  By the way, Piedmont had one violent crime in 2007.

            Look at the following charts to see fair “secular trend” comparisons.  Oakland is in an entirely different paradigm of violent crimes.

            Back to the Rotunda gathering:

            You have to give Ignacio credit…  He’s a ball of energy, concerned, and banging on the door for solutions.  He staged an event where Oakland’s efforts at public safety were placed in dire perspective.  While Oakland's police apparatus has fallen apart, Chief Davis was obviously doing something right in San Jose.  What difference did Chief Davis offer?  

            He had Attitude.  He talked about challenges, not problems.  He mentioned, “…never throwing in the towel with excuses.”  He underscored the notion that “lemonade is made out of lemons.”  When talking about budget cuts, he spoke with conviction when he said, “We may not know how, but we can always get it done.”  He said, he won’t accept just “…whining about the problems.”  These comments weren’t all at once, but throughout his half hour talk.  Confident optimism was obviously a part of his leadership DNA.

            His theme was, “When you’re doing the things you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got.”  He qualified that with the admonition that if you’re doing something right, stick with it, and make it better.  It makes one think about OPD’s Chief doing the same thing for four years – slash and burn.  Wayne Tucker, new to urban policing, has been on a four-year crusade to throw out what he never experienced – to eliminate OPD’s “old fashioned practices,” dismiss morale, “break” its culture, and disintegrate traditional precepts such as Response and Investigations.  He’s turned the Department upside down and inside out, without sufficient information, planning, or follow-up. 

            Just remember that the original Indianapolis 500 in 1911 saw the winner hitting a speed of 74.6 mph.  Huge advantages in high tech, driving skills, vehicle design and engineering, showed up in enough progress to see last year’s cars hit speeds of 226 mph.  The lesson in this (Chief Tucker) is that no one in this parade of progress ever said let’s throw out the “old fashioned practices.”  The cars of today still have four air-filled tires on the ground, an internal combustion engine, a steering wheel, and they still depend on a driver who knows what to do.   As reference, Chief Tucker seems to claim having “re-invented the wheel” by coincidentally returning OPD to the same three-Precinct System that was designed new in 1911 and tossed out in 1955.

            Someone asked Chief Davis the magic question everyone knew would be asked.  What was he doing in San Jose that could be replicated in Oakland?  It should have been expected that respectful protocol would demand he waffle on an answer.  After all, the Oakland Chief was seated about eight feet from him.  What he said was not important, and everyone in the room knew it.  The answer to the question was self-evident and personified by his Attitude.  He was relentlessly positive, confident, had precepts to a working plan, valued good questions over failed answers, and was almost giddy with enthusiasm.

            He wanted everyone to know that San Jose has challenges.  They’ve suffered budget cuts eight years in a row.  They have the same number of traffic officers as in 1986 and the same number of sworn personnel since 1998.  Yet, their population has climbed from a little over 700,000 in 1986 to over a million today… with generally the same public safety resources.  Oakland has fewer people today than in 1950.  OPD had 30 Traffic Motor Officers in 1986, and it has six working today.  There are fewer than a third of the Investigators at OPD today than 30 years ago, yet we have over 100 more cops on the payroll.  Go figure.  We used to field 178 Officers in regular assignments on 35 Beats.  Today, there are 526 sworn personnel in the Bureau of Field Operations, and the Beat System has been thrown out.  Sadly, we have all the personnel needed, the very best, and more than enough budget, high tech equipment, and facilities, but the OPD has been reconstructed and deconstructed into a flimsy house of blank cards.

            There were many nuances in what Chief Davis said that could be correlated with Oakland, but with differential interpretation.  As example, he said, as Tucker/Kozicki have often said,”We can’t arrest our way out of the problem.”  Yet, when Davis said it, one couldn’t escape the confidence that San Jose was making sufficient arrests.  The distinction, to be sure, is that San Jose must feel that there is much more to controlling crime than just making arrests, but that arrests of course are necessary.  The frustration is that Tucker/Kozicki seem to explain the unimportance of arrests as a justification for their inability to control high violence, whereas Davis explains arrests as a part of a fully connected matrix of problem solving relationships in keeping violence low.  As he says, it’s all about “connecting.”

            Earlier, if anyone is looking for specifics, Davis mentioned how important Responding to Calls was for him.  He spoke of Beat officers and high tech in a way that blended their importance into his theme of “connecting with the community.”  He wants to first send “the regularly assigned Beat Officer,” but his GPS system would find an optimum alternate if the Beat Officer was busy elsewhere. Of course, as he detailed, the regular Beat Officer would do the paper work and take over when possible.  OPD abandoned the regular 35 Beat Officer Patrol Division system.

           Chief Davis hammered several times that good police work is about “Relationships, relationships, relationships.”  He discussed this in terms that made Prevention, Intervention, and Suppression more than just word-frosting on a cake of inaction, as in Oakland.   He said that success in public safety is all about “connections.”  One must make the connections between the Beat Officers, the community citizens and businesses, the other city agencies, the law-breakers, and all the resources available.

            San Jose spends about $280 million on a police force with 1,356 officers, according to Chief Davis.  I recall we'll be spending about $214 million on 803 officers.  If correct, Oakland spends about $60,000 more per police officer for the whole police effort (all personnel, headquarters, equipment, etc.).  The translation of this, in terms of efficiency, is that for the same money spent by San Jose on their police, OPD could, within its current budget, have 1,036 Officers today.  Let me repeat that.  Oakland could have 233 more cops for the same money as we’re spending now! [Keep in mind that San Jose cops make more than Oakland cops.]

            It’s not that Chief Davis wouldn’t like more cops.  He lamented how he has only 130 cops per thousand.  Given current population figures, he’s probably right.  Keep in mind that Oakland, with 803 cops (832?), now has well over 200 cops per thousand.   The irony is: (1) Oakland has many more cops than all cities in California (per population) over 100,000 except for S.F. and L.A.  Yet we have by far the most violent crimes.  (2) The most violent cities nationally have many more cops per population than Oakland.  We have the best cops… so what is it?  Leadership?  Management?  Yes.

            Although he mentioned this indirectly, Chief Davis has had to confront dramatic demographic dynamics in San Jose that sociologists would say contribute to expectations of higher crimes.  Yet he has served five years as Chief of Police, steadily keeping San Jose at the top of the list as “Safest City.”  On the other hand, Oakland’s demographics have changed in ways that we should expect would result in fewer people committing crimes, and yet in the past four years we have suffered a paradigm escalation of violence. 

            Very telling was when Chief Davis said that last year he attended 178 community events on weekends, and that was a number fewer than the previous year. 

            Thank you Council President De La Fuente for hosting the Movers and Shakers Breakfast.

ronoz