Q&A: New Investigation Finds Most People Injured, Killed by San José Police are Mentally Ill or Intoxicated

A new investigation from the Bay Area News Group, KQED, and the California Reporting Project finds that the vast majority of people seriously injured or killed by San José police are either mentally ill or intoxicated.

Journalists reviewed eight years of police records and found that, even with crisis intervention training, the trend has continued — and, in recent years, slightly worsened.

Robert Salonga covers criminal justice and public safety for the Bay Area News Group. He spoke to KQED’s Rachael Vasquez about the investigation.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Rachael Vazquez: You and your reporting team reviewed thousands of pages of police records for this story. What’s the most important takeaway in your mind?

Robert Salonga: The most important takeaway is the limit to which so-called crisis intervention training had an effect on the rates of people with mental illness or psychiatric emergencies suffering serious use of force at the hands of San José police. There was a demarcation line in 2017 when the San Jose Police Department instituted it department-wide. And what we can tell from before and from after is that the numbers of people being seriously injured who are mentally ill, have a psychiatric crisis or are intoxicated to the point where they exhibit similar behavior, did not change significantly. So it definitely calls into question how effective this training is and bolsters a lot of movements and programs all over the country about finding an alternative to police when it comes to responding to these kinds of emergencies.

One story that I think shed some light on what these interactions can be like is the arrest of William Wallace in 2021. Can you tell us what happened there? 

Well, in the case of William Wallace, he was a man who was near downtown San José. He was walking with his bike and he was stopped by a police officer for walking on the street. And so the official offense for which he was contacted was jaywalking. Mr. Wallace refused to stop for the officer, and it escalated from there. At no point did it seem like Mr. Wallace was posing any kind of imminent physical threat. His offense seemed more that he was not complying with the officer and it eventually got physical between both sides, and it resulted in a broken nose for Mr. Wallace for, again, an underlying offense initially of jaywalking.

What do San José police have to say about your findings? 

The general response from San José police has been to point out that the data we looked at, which covers strictly serious injury and death, are a small fraction of the psychiatric emergency calls and calls of that type that they encounter overall. So what they’re arguing generally is that this is a small slice of outcomes that typically end peacefully. They also state that the number of calls that involve someone in psychiatric emergency or with an apparent mental illness has more than doubled over the last few years. And so generally their point is the number of times they have to deal with this scenario has skyrocketed.

If training hasn’t worked so far, what can police do to make these interactions less violent and, in some cases, less deadly? 

I think one of the main takeaways we got from doing all of this data review is there are a lot of scenarios in which the underlying offense for a police contact is relatively minor. So I think there ought to be a review and some introspection about when they can let things go and when they shouldn’t. And when we’ve brought that question and posed that question to police, they generally agree and say their officers have full discretion on whether to walk away. But we know that the reality is it’s not that easy and it’s not that simple.

And in fairness, I would guess that walking away from a situation would be pretty counterintuitive to police. 

It’s a very difficult thing to consider because when people call 9-1-1, they call police. They expect police to solve the problem and do something about it. And if police officers exercised that discretion and deemed what they were called in for to not be worth a potential escalation of violence, that would be the ideal. But then they also have to be accountable to the public and residents and people who expect something to be done when they call for help.

Well, I know you’ve talked to families whose loved ones have been killed by police in these kinds of interactions. What do they want to see change? 

The families of victims want to see more recognition of mental illness and psychiatric emergencies in the moments that they understand that this isn’t black and white. It’s very gray. There’s a combination of both a psychiatric emergency and some danger to the officers or to the public. But they don’t believe that should necessarily equal what they call a death sentence just for calling. So that’s the broadest takeaway — this idea of taking time, exercising patience, and keeping distance when being up close to someone who might have a weapon isn’t absolutely necessary. So it’s along the lines of wanting to make sure that serious use of force and lethal force are really used as a last resort.