San Jose State and community organizations are forming a coalition that advocates for defunding the University Police Department, removing officers from campus and establishing policing alternatives.
Nine student representatives from advocacy groups and political organizations including Students for Gregory Johnson, Students for a Democratic Society, Young Democratic Socialists of America and the Jakara Movement were some of the coalition members in attendance at Thursday's meeting on Zoom.
Muskan Parashar, musical performance senior and Silicon Valley’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter member, said it’s “pretty symbolic” to have armed police officers on campus.
“We live in a world where people, especially minorities, are seen as potential criminals first and people second . . . We exist in this huge system based on the prison and jail industrial complex that’s just woven into the fabric of our society,” Parashar said during the meeting. “There's no escape from it even at school where we’re paying thousands of dollars to attend.”
Parashar said UPD’s interests are the same as the university’s: money.
Jacqueline Rivera, SJSU alumna and I Find Silicon Valley advocacy group member, said the university allocates too much money to UPD, especially as myriad student needs aren't being met.
In 2019-20, the UPD budget was $7,052,170 where more than $6 million went to officer salaries, benefits and work study, and about $441,000 was allocated to operating expenses, according to the budget report.
According to the same UPD report, $4,372,102 went to salaries, $2,179,094 to benefits and $59,818 to work study.
Kenneth Mashinchi, SJSU senior director of strategic communications and media relations, said it’s important to note the UPD budget amounts to less than one percent of the university’s annual budget.
Mashinchi said UPD is authorized to have 35 sworn police officers and currently has 25 “on board.”
Rivera said defunding UPD isn’t going to solve everything that’s systemically wrong but it’s
one blow the coalition can hit against the prevalent injustices that are “ringing upon our students.”
“We should think about the students from a holistic standpoint like with the tuition, with the housing, with everything,” Rivera said during the meeting. “Why do we need to funnel so much money into [UPD] when they could just be . . . putting more money into better access to food, more affordable housing or even lowering different tuition costs because it's a hybrid [model]?”
She said UPD’s paid to prioritize protecting the university as a private property more than students' lives and well-being, adding they aren't actually required to “use their lives” to keep students safe.
Community mistrust in UPD
Tiffany Yep, SJSU sociology senior and Students For Gregory Johnson director, said many students have told the advocacy group they don’t feel safe with UPD presence.
Rivera agreed with Yep, adding it’s triggering for students of color to see armed officers on campus.
Yep said while students feeling unsafe and anxious around UPD officers is a prominent issue that needs to be addressed, the department in hand needs to be more honest with the university’s community.
She said serious incidents have been occuring on campus that the UPD hasn’t disclosed to students, faculty and staff, even though students have been involved in the reports.
“I live on campus and there was an incident where people were chasing each other with knives a few weeks ago and I thought that was very strange that we didn't hear about that at all,” Yep said during the meeting. “We only heard from the Spartan Daily about that and I think it shows police really aren't really doing their jobs . . . I personally do not feel safe knowing that there are people with knives who're running around and . . . then the police didn't tell us anything about it.”
UPD responded to a stabbing attempt in the Campus Village Sept. 1 in which a San Jose State student had a knife and was threatening three other students, according to previous Spartan Daily reporting.
UPD Capt. Frank Belcastro told the Spartan Daily in its Sept. 2 article that the student received a misdemeanor citation.
Parashar said she has a distrust toward UPD because of Gregory Johnson Jr.’s death.
Johnson, who was a 20-year-old student and Sigma Chi fraternity member, was found hanging in the fraternity house basement in 2008.
The UPD and Santa Clara County Medical Examiner-Coroner's Office ruled the case a suicide, according to the coroner’s office autopsy report.
However, many community members and advocacy organizations including Students For Gregory Johnson have demanded SJSU recognize Johnson’s death as a hate crime and cover-up.
Mashinchi said the university is examining and addressing systemic racism through its Taskforce on Community Safety and Policing.
“The taskforce is charged with examining ‘the critical safety issues of the San Jose State University campus and the roles the University Police Department and other campus departments, student and community organizations, neighborhood associations and other groups have in ensuring an environment conducive to learning, racial justice and equity,” Mashinchi said.
The taskforce is made up of 13 faculty members and students including Vice President for Student Affairs Patrick Day, UPD Capt. Frank Belcastro and Dalila Gomez, SJSU student and Associated Students, Inc. director of student rights and responsibilities, according to Sept. 15 university blog post from President Mary Papazian.
Mashinchi said a final report from the program will be provided to Papazian.
Policing alternatives
During the meeting, several student members suggested ideas and programs for the coalition to look into as alternatives to campus policing.
Rivera said UPD must be replaced with mental health assistance teams and programs for therapy and counseling, drug prevention, sexual harassment prevention and whatever else students need.
Tarab Ansari, SJSU social work senior and mental health intern at Behavioral Health Contractors’ Association, suggested the coalition form a policy with the university that strips UPD of the duty to respond to on-campus mental health incidents.
The Behavioral Health Contractors’ Association is a Santa Clara County-wide network of community-based, non-profit organizations that provide mental health and substance use prevention, treatment, recovery and supportive transitional housing services, according to its website.
“Right now on campus, if you're having a mental health crisis, UPD shows up, right, and you don't want them showing up because you don't want to get handcuffed,” Ansari said during the meeting. “You don't want to be criminalized for having a mental crisis.”
Ansari said there are resources available in Santa Clara County that will send unarmed community residents, mental health workers and emergency medical service providers to help individuals experiencing a mental health crisis: the Behavioral Health Services Department’s new Community Mobile Response Program.
The county’s response program, which advanced on June 2 with a nearly $28 million investment approved by San Jose City Council, is designed to reduce the need to call law enforcement, allowing incidents and needs to be effectively and quickly addressed in the community before they escalate, according to its website.
The Community Mobile Response Program, beginning on Jan. 1, 2022, will address community needs through a “race equity and social justice lens,” according to its website. It will operate 24/7, year-round.
The program’s key components include: family involvement or encouraging the client’s family or support person in all steps of the process, based on the client’s preference; a new 3-digit community phone line that’s not 911 or 311; trauma-informed mobile response vehicles; community collaborators who obtain the program’s feedback and build a continuous feedback mechanism; community members who designate the staff, prioritizing linguistically and culturally informed staff with relevant lived experiences.
Ansari said the coalition should draft a policy connecting the program to SJSU and present it to the county’s Board of Trustees.
The pilot program will test if law enforcement response is even needed so if it’s successful, services will be expanded to other areas in the future, according to the Community Mobile Response Program website.
The mobile response program followed a community engagement and program development process the county initiated in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 that heightened longstanding concerns about law enforcement interactions with communities of color, according to its website.
Reform process
Tiffany Yep said the coalition’s first goal is to “power map” to identify who’s in charge of services including the UPD and SJSU’s Counseling and Psychological Services and direct channels for the group to implement reform.
She said she hopes to create a board with both students and faculty members where they can try to get work done together or create a type of oversight committee, where the university transparently communicates UPD reform progress, campus incidents, demographics and other areas to student representatives.
“I think we're in a state where we're more attacking the university because we are not really working with them,” Yep said.
Yep said the coalition intends to meet every Thursday on Zoom and it’s open to university community members.
She said while the weekly meeting time is 4 p.m., the set time is subject to change to better accommodate the group majority’s availability, especially as the coalition intends to recruit more members.
Yep said the coalition also wants to survey students to better understand what they’re going through, what they need and how they feel about UPD presence and duty on campus.
“Obviously, we're a coalition that wants to do things [including] defund the police and things like that but we don't know that's what the broader campus community would want,” Yep said. “So I think we really should be talking to people, just seeing what people, overall, think about these kinds of things and what the campus climate is.”
