Happy Hanukkah. This is San Jose Inside’s weekly open forum, where comments and opinions on any topic are welcome. What’s on your mind?

The problem isn’t the police; it’s the people. That’s the underlying theme of a controversial editorial that appeared in Protect San Jose earlier this week. The piece was written by attorney Terry Bowman, who represents one of the officers involved in the videotaped beating of Vietnamese student Phuong Ho this September.

As complaints about the San Jose Police Department’s use of force play out in both the traditional and the social media spheres, calls continue for the resignation of “the man we all love to hate,” as state NAACP president Alice Huffman introduced San Jose’s police chief at a community event on Saturday, Dec. 5.

For Rob Davis, who is fighting to keep his job, winning this latest round means shifting attention away from the actions of his officers and towards a more nuanced discussion about public policy, community attitudes, media missteps and the ambiguity of grainy video clips.

Chuck Reed is expected to announce today that he plans to run for a second term as mayor of San Jose. In a prepared statement Reed will announce that he plans to continue focusing on developing the city’s economy and promoting it as a center for clean tech development. He also intends to bring greater transparency to City Hall and overcome the achievement gap in the city’s schools.

San Jose’s movers and shakers are wrestling with two important questions.  First, should the San Jose convention center expansion project move forward?  And second, where should the new federal courthouse be built?

As reported on San Jose Inside last week, the city and state budget crisis has forced the city and its redevelopment agency to scale back the project from $300 million to $140 million.  And, the state’s plan to pull $75 million from the San Jose RDA creates an additional hurdle.  Councilmember Sam Liccardo has indicated that he is, “...not willing to do anything that puts the RDA’s future viability in peril.”

It is very difficult with an overwhelmed system of public education for teachers to nurture the needs of children who have experienced a sordid life. Most times these youth who need just one person to “really” care come from homes and neighborhoods filled with crime, drugs, gangs, and ridden with violence.

As I have discussed on this blog before I began my career as a teacher at Osborne School at Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall. I quickly learned that what is essential in order to become an effective teacher for alternative youth is a professional relationship built with trust, care, and genuineness at its core. In a trusting student-teacher relationship there is a strong possibility that real academic learning and increased student achievement will occur.

Prior to Mayor Reed, the City of San Jose would amend the General Plan (GP) approximately seven to twelve times a year; which equates to about once every month, give or take. During this time, about 1,200 acres of industrial land were converted to residential housing. As a result, the City lost 1,200 acres of land that could have been home to jobs. A sizable percentage of the 1,200 acres was in my district.

The expansion of the McEnery Convention Center has long been the crown jewel of the San Jose Redevelopment Agency’s list of projects. Then came the budget crisis—city and state—which clobbered potential funding for the project, and caused the proposal to be scaled down by more than half, from $300 million to $140 million. Now Mayor Chuck Reed is asking the most fundamental question of all: Can we really afford to go ahead with the expansion?

There’s a reason people hold on to the remote during all of their favorite programs, and its not just to surf the channels when a commercial comes on. Often, it’s to lower the volume when that same commercial comes on.

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Emerson ruled yesterday that limits on campaign contributions by independent political committees violate those committees’ freedom of speech. According to City Attorney Rick Doyle, the ruling effectively invalidates the city’s existing soft-money contribution limits, capping individual contributions to campaigns at $250. In August, the City Council voted to maintain the cap.

Tonight it is purported that we will hear the president in front of cadets from West Point tell the nation and the world that we will commit an additional 30,000 US troops to the war in Afghanistan at a cost of $1 million per soldier per year. I don’t profess to know what is best for the world and our ultimate safety as a nation, however I do know our national security is threatened significantly by our failing public schools.

A couple of weeks ago I put together my own web based Redevelopment Budget survey. I shared financial information in bullet point form in the introduction and then gave information throughout the survey. In some cases I would state the dollar amount given to a particular program and then ask a question. More than 600 people completed the survey, which required that each question be answered. The survey could not be taken twice.

As with most issues that involve money, the feedback to my survey was mixed

Last week, by chance I saw some of the highlights of US Attorney General Eric Holder’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the decision to move Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and several other of the 9/11 terrorist suspects’ trials to a court in New York. During his testimony, Mr. Holder was asked a pointed question by Sen. Lindsey Graham that, to my surprise, went missing from the Bay Area’s major newspapers’ following day coverage.

Last week, at the city council meeting, I removed an item from the consent calendar on the agenda for discussion. As you may remember from my blog about San Jose’s million-dollar golf nets, consent calendar items do not have individual discussion, but rather are voted on all at the same time. If one wants to discuss a consent item, you have to “remove” it for discussion.

The item I removed was asking $993,876 for the library to spend over the course of seven years on an online tutoring service for kids.

Mayor Chuck Reed is in Washington to tell the Administration what he thinks of the stimulus package. The feds probably wish he hadn’t come at all. When asked at a meeting at the Brookings Institute how $79 million in federal stimulus funding has helped San Jose deal with the recession, Reed answered, “It’s been a very minimal impact.”

“The money you give us to put people to work is not creating long-term jobs,” Reed complained

Following a cell phone video that shows SJSU student Phuong Ho being hit with batons and tased by the SJPD officers, the department claimed he was resisting arrest. Enhanced audio of the video taken by one of Ho’s housemates on his cellphone seems to tell a different story.