The San Jose police union, the San Jose Police Officers’ Association, today issued a scathing indictment of the police department’s internal affairs procedures and demanded that City Hall improve its oversight of those procedures.
The union demanded an end to what it called “a broken discipline process within the San Jose Police Department,” and released a video it contended “details criminal, unconstitutional, unethical and incompetent actions that are sanctioned by SJPD command staff and city administration leadership that have ruined police officer lives.”
In a statement released before the union’s noon press conference at union headquarters on North Fourth Street, president Steve Slack said the video shows evidence of “rampant corruption, falsehoods and incompetence.”
“We demand a fair, transparent and just discipline process,” said Slack. “What we have now is broken and riddled with petty vindictiveness, incompetence and outright corruption. When an official document is altered, with white-out, of all things, to reach a different conclusion, it should spur the police chief, city manager and city attorney to demand reform and hold wrongdoers accountable rather than doubling down to protect corruption.”
The police department referred all inquiries to City Attorney Nora Frimann. Shortly after the press conference, Frimann had not responded to email questions from San Jose Inside.
San Jose Deputy Police Brian Spears, in a confidential deposition video released by police officers' union.
The video contained excerpts of videos from confidential depositions by San Jose Police Chief Paul Joseph, Deputy Police Chief Brian Spears and two internal affairs lieutenants, and quoted, from city documents, Allison Suggs, assistant director of the city’s Office of Human Relations.
A union spokesman said today that "the only reason we found out about what they [city officials] were doing was because the city proposed a new process that we agreed to that allowed for expanded discovery. Under the old rules we would have never known what they did."
The videos and documents released by the union were related to five different disciplinary cases, the union said.
The police union video, a compilation of multiple deposition videos, was narrated by Jim Shore, an attorney and partner with Massing Adam Jasmine Adam.
In one video, Spears appears to admit that he altered official internal affairs investigative documents, but declined to say whether he was ordered to do so.
“Spears altered official investigative documents with a white-out, by changing a sergeant’s official written submission from a ‘personnel matter,’ which called for no further action against an officer, to a ‘request for department-initiated investigation’ – a significant escalation – and one that forever changed the course of one officer’s career when he was later terminated,” the unidentified narrator said in the police union video released today.
Spears “concealed unlawful conduct for more than two years,” the union alleged.
The union also said that internal affairs investigator Lt. John Barg “submitted four search warrant affidavits, under penalty of perjury, to a Superior Court Judge that were untruthful and contained material omissions and material misrepresentations.” In an answer to a question about this in the video deposition, Barg said, “At that point, no, I guess that was not true.”
A union spokesman said Barg's actions were in connection with San Jose police officer Michael Richmond, who had been terminated in 2023 for alleged misconduct, then reinstated this spring on appeal.
In March, an arbitrator ordered Richmond’s full reinstatement as a city police officer, and later found the department owed him about $300,000 in back pay and benefits.
The arbitration also ordered the city to pay $1.3 million in legal fees, finding that Barg's actions violated Richmond’s Fourth Amendment rights
The union also said that four days after the District Attorney’s Office had refused to file charges in Lt. Barg’s investigation, Barg violated the court’s order to seal the use of information gathered in his criminal investigation, [and] sent all search warrant materials to an Internal Affairs sergeant to start an administrative investigation.”
In the video released today by the union, Joseph attempted to explain why there are no specific training procedures for internal affairs investigators.
“I don’t know that there’s specific training in the way that you asked that question,” the chief said in the deposition. “There’s not specific training for a lieutenant on the precise topic of determining the thoroughness and fairness of an internal affairs investigator’s work.”
Union narrator Shore commented that “While the chief insisted that no training is needed, his command officers routinely struggle to meet their obligations under the department’s duty manual and admit they are not even aware those obligations even exist.”
The police chief’s “assessment of his officers’ capabilities just doesn’t sync with the reality in his own department,” the union’s video narrator said.
In the video, Shore said the city’s review process “meant to provide oversight and accountability to the discipline process exists in name only.”
“The buck should stop at the city manager’s office, the final quality control check,” according to the union. “Instead, it’s become a rubber stamp for shoddy work.”
As an example, the video narrator said that Suggs, of the Human Resources Department, “spent a total of 13 minutes before deciding to terminate an officer.”
The investigation materials in the case cited, but not identified, by the union “consisted of nearly 15,000 pages of documents, hours of recorded interviews and body camera footage, reams of work that should have been reviewed but were not.”
The police union said: “Since 2015, the City Manager’s Office has been on notice that its oversight procedures needed an overhaul. The city’s own auditor recommended that the city establish minimum training requirements to improve the essential skills of its investigators, yet here we are a decade later: The same problems exist and there is no recognition of the need for reform – not yet.”
