Community organizers gathered outside San Jose City Hall on Wednesday to demand accountability of a San Jose Police Union Executive’s alleged drug trafficking.
Joanne Segovia, who served as the executive director of the San Jose Police Officers Association, turned herself in last Friday after being charged with attempting to import fentanyl from overseas, according to a March 31, 2023 ABC 7 article.
Segovia has since been placed on paid leave and faces a maximum of 20 years in prison if convicted according to a March 31, 2023 KTVU article.
Gilroy City Councilmember Rebeca Armendariz said Segovia needs to be held accountable as Gilroy is one of the hardest hit communities regarding fentanyl poisoning.
“This is a slap in the face to all of the families working hard to find accountability to keep their families and their children safe,” Armendariz said. “They need to be transparent and they need their feet to be held to the fire. They cannot do this, they cannot poison our families and get away with it.”
Segovia had worked as the executive director of the San Jose Police Officer’s Association for 20 years and had been shipping pills internationally as recently as March 15, 2023 according to the same KTVU article.
Sociology senior Kat Adamson, who serves as a member of Students Against Mass Incarceration said it was important to attend the gathering in order to hold the police department accountable.
“Fentanyl is just devastating our communities,” Adamson said. “Having this large trafficking organization really makes things a lot easier for people to get injured or even die from fentanyl deaths.”
Fentanyl-related deaths in Santa Clara County increased from 11 in 2018 to 132 in 2021, according to an Oct. 24, 2022 San Jose Spotlight article.
“It’s important to acknowledge that Joanne Segovia drug trafficking was blatant and went on for years which leads us to wonder how she wasn’t caught sooner,” Adamson said. “The ability of Segovia to traffic drugs right under the noses of law enforcement for so long is an obvious example of how broken our law enforcement system is.”
William Armaline, director of the SJSU Human Rights Institute, questioned how Segovia was able to allegedly run this scheme and who may have helped her.
“If the allegations are substantiated, is there any evidence of connection to the use of illegal opioids within law enforcement agencies as evidenced by the overdose death of former SJPD officer and San Jose State University football player DeJon Packer in 2022?” Armaline said.
DeJon Packer was found dead of fentanyl toxication in his Milpitas home in 2022, the former student athlete was the football team’s running back and a rookie officer for SJPD at the time of his death, according to an April 30, 2022 KTVU article.
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan responded to the allegations on his Twitter, thanking U.S. Attorney Ismail Ramsey for following where fentanyl was coming from and holding drug dealers accountable.
“This is an incredibly disturbing allegation. No one is above the law, regardless of who their employer is,” Mahan wrote in a March 29, 2023 Tweet.
The San Jose City Council recently unanimously passed Mahan’s budget which included investments to the police officer staff, according to a Tuesday Spartan Daily article.
Sociology and Information Science and Data Analytics sophomore Cole Mitchell, a member of Students For Police Accountability, said the mayor needs to divert efforts away from police.
“I think it’s completely unreasonable to think that just having more and more police is going to actually solve anything in San Jose,” Mitchell said. “We have hundreds of millions of dollars going towards the police unions and police department when we have the number one youth homeless population in the country.”
SJPD had a 17% budget increase since 2019, according to an October 11, 2022 ABC 7 News article.
“We’ve had a growing fentanyl and drug issue in the Bay Area and around the country and it just speaks on the lack of morality in the police department,” Mitchell said.
He said he hopes that Segovia is held to the full extent of the law.
“They often are pushing for more legislation to further criminalize drug use, while being the ones who are directly contributing to the problem,” Mitchell said.
