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Can Chief Davis Survive?

How did the once-popular Rob Davis become the most controversial top cop in recent San Jose history?

by Erin Sherbert on Apr 08, 2009
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The disasters tumbled like dominoes. A Taser death, a police shooting, and later a community blowup over allegations that San Jose’s police disproportionately arrest Latinos for public-drunkenness. Concerned that policing practices damaged downtown’s economic health, the downtown association’s head called for a commission to help police better manage nightlife issues.

In the past six months, Rob Davis has lost support, becoming the most controversial San Jose police chief since the department became a modern urban force under Harvard-educated reformer Joseph McNamara three decades ago.

The affable chief is typically comfortable in the public eye, but these days, Davis is discovering that he cannot talk his way out of trouble. His critics include not only traditional police watchdogs like the ACLU, the NAACP and Latino community groups but also city officials, business owners and law enforcement leaders.

“He’s adamantly in the hot seat right now,” says SJPD Sgt. Bobby Lopez, president of the San Jose Police Officers Association, which represents San Jose’s 1,400 sworn officers. “There seems to be a groundswell against him. Issues are cascading. And at the bottom of them is the signature ‘Robert L. Davis.’”

On Feb. 11, police killed 28-year-old Richard Lua with a Taser device during a struggle outside his East Side home. He was the sixth person to die after being subdued by Taser gun since 2005. A month earlier, on Jan. 18, police tased a woman and shot her husband outside a nightclub on Second Street. According to witness reports, the altercation began when police threatened to arrest the man for public intoxication as he exited a nightclub after an argument with bouncers.

By this time, concerns over public intoxication and racial profiling had blown up. On Oct. 19, the Mercury News reported that San Jose Police were arresting more people for public intoxication than any other city in the state.

Responding to community concerns, the San Jose City Council held a public hearing on Nov. 18, where hundreds of angry residents packed City Council chambers.

Among those attending was Blanca Alvarado, the former councilwoman and county supervisor. She patiently waited her turn at the podium. Around 10pm, she took the mic. Tired after hours of testimony, Alvarado scolded the City Council for allowing this
issue to escalate.

“It is sorrowful to be here once again to talk about community relations with the police department,” Alvarado said. “We are very, very discontented by what we have read in the newspaper of the disproportionate number of arrests of Latinos in the
downtown. These are not new issues for us, Mayor Reed. I can go back 30 years, and now today we are still having grave concerns about what we consider unfair treatment of the Police Department. There are times when we feel disregarded, disrespected,
uncared for, unprotected, and in fact, violated.”

Friends and Enemies

Alvarado’s comments were a pivotal moment for Davis. Not long ago, the chief had a reputation for being a friend of Latinos and other ethnic communities. He would show up at Vietnamese businesses’ ribbon-cuttings, undertake an empathy fast for Ramadan or
drive to a Spanish-speaking neighborhood and hold a press conference in its native tongue. Davis could also be spotted at monthly La Raza Roundtable meetings, taking careful notes and sticking around to talk to attendees afterward.

Now, the same legion of Latinos who backed Davis during his ascendancy are speaking out against him.

Raul Colunga, founder of the civil rights organization La Raza Roundtable, says he likes the chief. He reports that there are some folks who still support Davis, but others question whether he is the right person to sort out this mess.

“He speaks Spanish—great. But that only gets you so far,” Colunga says. “It’s caused us to take a step backward and question—how effective is this guy?”

Rick Callender, a former NAACP president, says he has been watching the problems mount under Davis’ leadership, particularly since the drunken-arrests issue surfaced.

How do you talk your way out of this? You can’t use fuzzy math to get out of this one. The numbers speak for themselves.” Callender says. “I think he’s in trouble.”

Davis has also drawn sharp criticism from downtown entertainment establishment owners. “The chief is very articulate and very convincing, and he can make you feel warm and fuzzy,” says John Conway, owner of Britannia Arms bar downtown. “But then nothing
necessarily gets changed.”

Scott Knies, director of the San Jose Downtown Association, says that with Chief Davis everything is “colored and spun.” Knies concedes that the chief has led a professional department. That said, he believes Davis has created a culture where police spend too much time “sweating the small stuff, like jaywalking.”

“It’s unfair to say it is all Chief Davis,” Knies says, “but certainly there has been more of this letter-of-the-law, not spirit-of-the-law enforcement.”

One downtown property owner, who counts several high-ranking San Jose police officers as personal friends, says Davis, who came up through the administrative side of the department, has lost the respect of the street cops. This businessman, who asked that his name not be used, believes that under Davis, the SJPD has lost its way—and points to the huge number of public-intoxication arrests as evidence.

“They need to arrest real crooks,” he says, “not a guy who’s had a few beers at Mission Ale House and walks over to Toon’s and is heading back to Mission.”

Attorneys Ignascio Camarena and Jeff Kallis are representing two Watsonville men in a class-action lawsuit against Davis and the city. Kallis says the two men were getting nachos and nonalcoholic drinks at a convenience store in downtown San Jose when
they were handcuffed and arrested for public intoxication.

They and other critics believe that under Davis, the SJPD has placed downtown San Jose under siege, and unfairly targets citizens for arrest.

“The chief of police and the mayor early on gave a statement that said, ‘Our purpose is to make an arrest before a crime occurs,’ Kallis says. “But that is not what you are allowed to do under the Constitution.”

“Chief Davis started five years ago, and that’s when all the problems started,” Camarena says. “We don’t say that the chief caused the change in the stats at this point but there is a trend that coincides with his tenure.”

Indeed, citizen complaints against the department fell four straight years under Davis’ predecessor, to a 10-year low of 329 in 2003, the year before Davis took over. Under Davis, complaints rose to 547 in 2007, and by midyear 2008 had increased another 10 percent over 2007, according to the Independent Police Auditor’s office.

In the wake of all the negative press, Mayor Chuck Reed has rallied to the chief’s defense, saying that Davis hasn’t been afraid to scrutinize the department’s policies and practices. While the mayor seems unwilling to openly confront the problem or to formulate a response to community concerns, members of the City Council, who have always deferred to the chief, are taking note of the community’s demand for accountability and change in the Police Department.

On March 18, City Manager Debra Figone, along with Mayor Reed and Davis, announced a new consortium with some of the nation’s top academics. The group will study and analyze San Jose arrest data to pinpoint any racial profiling or other problematic policing patterns that may have led to the high arrest rate among Latinos for public intoxication.

The study, which will be done next year, appears to take the place of a task force recently set up for the same purpose. Critics however, believe that it lacks independence because the consortium is channeled through the chief’s office.

Other members of the City Council are starting to question the chief’s leadership style, which Councilman Sam Liccardo called “inflexible.”

Liccardo has been one of the chief’s most outspoken critics. He’s been pushing the council and the chief to revamp the downtown-policing model to scale back on the number of police officers, among other things.

He has questions about why an officer tased the woman outside the night club on Second Street. Liccardo says it’s another one of those investigations that goes through SJPD’s internal affairs unit and gets dropped into the “black box” at the Police Department.


“No elected official wants to take on the police department unless things get incredibly bad and that is defined as routine attacks on the front page about issues of policing,” Liccardo says. “I think it’s finally gotten to that point.”

Policing by the Book

Davis, 51, was appointed chief in 2004, following in the footsteps of the popular William Lansdowne, now the chief of the San Diego Police Department. As one staffer puts it, “Lansdowne was the best thing since sliced bread.” He was known as a hard-core workaholic, who had boundless energy and was an innately decisive leader.

Davis shares his predecessor’s passion for police work, but he lacks Lansdowne’s experience. Davis approaches police work more pedantically, some officers say. He likes numbers, relies on flow charts and PowerPoint. He works his easy-going charm to get
people on his side.

Even Sgt. Lopez, who openly criticizes the chief, admits affection for him as a person. “I’m not a cheerleader for the man, but people are happy at the department, and the department is a reflection of Rob Davis,” Lopez says.

But it’s his cerebral, textbook approach to policing that rubs some members of his rank and file the wrong way. He’s smart, they say, but he’s not a “cop’s cop.”

“His claim to fame is that he’s never had to pull out his nightstick,” one source close to the SJPD noted.

Inside the force, Davis is apparently liked, but his leadership style does not receive high marks. According to one longtime SJPD officer, Davis can be temperamental, secretive and given to micromanagement.

As a result, his command staff can have a hard time knowing where they stand. This is hard on veteran officers who were accustomed to Lansdowne’s straight-talk style.

“With Lansdowne,” a longtime police officer recalls, “you’d give him a report, and the chief might say, ‘I’m not going to follow your recommendation on this,’ for whatever reason, ‘but you did a good job, thank you.’

“With Davis, you never know what’s going on. You give him a report or a request, and he says, ‘I’ll get back to you,’ and he never does. He’s operating in a vacuum.”

During a recent two-hour interview with Metro, Davis talked freely about how he stumbled into police work. He concedes that he’s not cut from the same cloth as previous chiefs—in fact, he said that growing up he never really wanted to be a cop. “I
was 22, and a friend of mine talked me into it,“ Davis recalled. “I thought it would look good on my résumé if I was heading off to law school.”

Davis, an English major, never made it to law school. Instead he climbed the ranks, working some patrol and administrative positions, from bureau of field operations to the airport division. “I fell in love with the job,” Davis says, adding that police
work combines his two favorites things: people and problem solving.

He was good at it. His boss, Lansdowne, liked his style and began grooming him for senior management. Lansdowne put Davis on the night desk for six months, then moved him over to internal affairs—to give him experience in a variety of settings so he’d
know the department well enough to assume a leadership position. He then recommended Davis for the top job, and the City Council gave him its blessing.

Lansdowne, now chief of the San Diego Police Department, had himself come up through the ranks, as had his predecessor, Lou Cobarrubias. Since McNamara, the city has developed leadership internally, which is good for organizational morale, since it
provides opportunities for advancement, but can lead to an ingrown culture.

“We generally don’t go out of our ranks,” says veteran Capt. Gary Kirby. “It’s not that our detectives are any better than the detectives in any other agency, but we have a connection to our community that allows us to solve cases.

“Otherwise, you could be greeted with nothing but closed doors and dead-end leads.”

The Not-So-Independent Auditor

Immediately after he was appointed chief, Davis had to smooth over relations with members of the Vietnamese community, which had been traumatized by a high-profile shooting. An officer had killed a mentally troubled Vietnamese woman brandishing a vegetable peeler. Madison Nguyen, then a community activist, was banging the doors of City Hall to attract political attention. Davis interceded immediately and effectively, and pledged to nurture relations with all ethnic communities.

It was partly this shooting incident that inspired Davis’ first major policy initiative: arming cops with Taser weapons. Designed to give officers a less-lethal way to protect themselves, these quickly caused a new set of problems. Citizens began filing complaints about unnecessary use of force—at the time, there were loose regulations about how many times an officer could tase a person. And then, tragically, a number of deaths occurred.

In 2006, Barbara Attard, the city’s Independent Police Auditor, stepped in, asking the council for the authority to review Taser-related deaths. After conducting audits and compiling statistical reports for the council in her first two years as the IPA, Attard says, she saw “holes in the process.”

Attard says that compared to other big cities, San Jose’s police oversight is weak. More than half of the citizen complaints were not being investigated thoroughly, she says, which raised both legal issues and concerns from a community accountability standpoint.

Attard consistently pointed out that she had no power to audit shootings and other incidents unless a complaint was filed. In other cities, the independent police auditor was allowed to “actually audit” and even allowed to sit in on officer interviews, she says.

Attard, who had held similar positions in Berkeley and San Francisco, publicly took on the chief, pushing for more power and police oversight in her office.

“I tried to remedy the issues in my dealings with the police chief and internal affairs, but was met with a deaf ear,” Attard says.

By October 2008, the City Council was flustered and worn down by the Attard-Davis relationship. In closed session, they voted to release Attard after her contract expired in December. According to Attard, the mayor told her he wasn’t interested in
spending the next four years debating her authority.

Attard says the council was unable to give her the power she needed to do her job effectively because they weren’t willing to cross Davis.

“Councilmembers were clear that they wanted the IPA to get along with the police chief,” she says. “Many of the councilmembers are adverse to controversy. The IPA is in the difficult position of being responsible for reporting issues to the council. Yet
if the police chief doesn’t agree, and chooses to have a negative relationship with the IPA, the IPA takes the heat.”

With Attard out of the picture now, the council only has one person to watch—Davis.



Continued



by Erin Sherbert on Apr 08, 2009
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