To analyze San Jose police officers’ use of force against the mentally impaired, journalists for the Bay Area News Group and the California Reporting Project, working with students from Stanford University and UC Berkeley, reviewed thousands of pages of police records released under California’s 2018 police transparency law, SB 1421, and the terms of a 2020 settlement of the news group’s lawsuit against the city of San Jose.
The analysis includes 106 cases involving 108 individuals who were seriously injured or beaten by police between 2014 and 2021. It combined cases involving police confrontations with mentally ill individuals, with those suffering from drug or alcohol intoxication, and with people acting erratically. Officers are typically trained to handle such situations similarly.
The case records do not always contain direct evidence that a subject of force had been diagnosed as mentally ill – or demonstrated to be intoxicated through blood or other tests. Instead, the journalists catalogued meaningful indications of such impairment, focusing on what officers believed to be true at the time force was used, or came to believe in the wake of the incident. That level of review led to far higher totals than the San Jose Police Department has officially reported – or than are typically reported across the country – revealing a trend far more alarming than previously thought.
San Jose police began using body-worn cameras midway through the study period, and journalists reviewed videos in 46 incidents, scrutinizing whether officers sought to de-escalate confrontations and avoid violence against impaired individuals, as they are trained to do. In many cases, the videos told a story at least somewhat different from the officers’ reports.
Given the unique and exhaustive nature of the review, it is not possible to compare San Jose’s treatment of the mentally impaired to the situation in other California departments. There is no evidence to suggest that the department’s use of force – either against the mentally impaired or overall – is atypical. What is unique is that San Jose was among the first to specially train its officers in how to engage these difficult confrontations and avoid violence.
