The San Jose Police Department’s ink-stained nemesis has gone native and joined the apparatus that puts people behind bars rather than hold the system accountable. That’s right, reporter Sean Webby is leaving the Mercury News to become a media coordinator for District Attorney Jeff Rosen.

UPDATE: San Jose Inside has selected reader questions and sent them to DA Jeff Rosen. Thanks to all who participated.
This week, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen has agreed to answer questions from San Jose Inside readers. He is the fifth public official to participate in this series. Questions are selected from online posts to this site.

The number of homicides in San Jose over the last six months has already surpassed the total for all of 2010, which is why the police department is accepting federal assistance to combat gang violence. Two federal immigration officers, who specialize in the removal of violent gang members that are in this country illegally, will be joining the police department.

A protocol put together a few weeks ago by deputy DA Jim Sibley tried to clarify his office’s stance on medical marijuana with a simple explanation: Collectives are legal under California law if they are clearly nonprofit and follow land-use codes. That didn’t stop Police Chief Chris Moore from telling the San Jose City Council that he’d heard directly from the DA’s office that not one of the 100-plus dispensaries in San Jose is legal.

The murder of shopkeeper Vahid Hosseini and the ensuing charges against Williams Rodriguez were a turning point in the political career of former District Attorney Dolores Carr. Now that Jeff Rosen is DA, the problem with Carr’s involvement in the case through her husband has vanished. But the State Attorney General’s office announced yesterday that it has decided to drop the case.

Having handily knocked off Dolores Carr in November’s election, District Attorney Jeff Rosen has so far delivered on his promise to make changes big and small in his department. In addition to reinstating the Cold Case Unit, Team Rosen is reinvigorating the Government Integrity Unit, a do-nothing department under Carr, which has been renamed the Public Integrity Unit and put in the hands of John Chase. Rosen also circulated a memo that bars blanket challenges on judges—a pointed (and entirely symbolic) gesture referencing one of his predecessor’s most controversial ploys.

An investigator from the district attorney’s office who has been spearheading recent raids on local medical marijuana dispensaries says every pot club in Santa Clara County is operating outside the law. Dean Ackemann, who has been responsible for obtaining search warrants for the task force that has been conducting armed raids in recent months, said that in his opinion every dispensary in the county should be shut down. “The search warrants and the investigations are not going to stop,” Ackemann vowed.
But he may be wrong

They’re calling him “RF Jay” at the district attorney’s office after a newspaper columnist compared him to late Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. And deposed DA Dolores Carr probably wishes she hadn’t demoted the office’s newly named chief assistant, Jay Boyarsky, back in 2007. That move ultimately wound up costing her her job. Oops….

In a small courtroom on the fifth floor of the Hall of Justice, Jeff Rosen made the final arguments of his last trial as a hands-on prosecutor on Tuesday. With thin fingers, he karate-chopped the air like a symphony conductor cueing the string, brass and percussion sections, except the players here were three accused murderers. “The buyer, the middleman, the hit man,” he called them.

There were cheers and hugs in the District Attorney’s office on the Friday that Jeff Rosen’s victory over Dolores Carr was announced.

Rosen spent Monday and Tuesday walking from desk to desk shaking hands with everyone in the office, and leaving handwritten notes for those who were out. Since he’d been on leave for the campaign, Rosen wasn’t carrying his entry badge, so the DA-elect had to go to the office’s information desk and be issued a visitor’s badge.

When he returned on Tuesday, he didn’t have a county-issued parking spot, so he went in to get a placard and returned to a ticket on the dash. Rosen says he wants to talk to the officer who issued the ticket, not to ask for a break but because the timekeeper wasted no time in writing the summons.

It’s official: it was determined Friday afternoon that Challenger Jeff Rosen defeated District Attorney Dolores Carr Tuesday in an upset victory by a previously unknown 15-year prosecutor.

At the close of Tuesday’s poll, Rosen held a 2,217-vote lead, but the County Registrar’s office determined Wednesday it would still have to count 77,000 provisional and mailed ballots to determine a victor.

The big action of the night was downtown at Agenda, where a packed house celebrated Jeff Rosen’s thin lead in the District Attorney’s race.

Around 11pm, Rosen mercifully decided to cut up and pass out his victory cake, even though it would be a few hours or more before anyone could claim victory.

If Rosen pulled it out, and it looked like he would, it would become the first time in almost a century that a challenger had toppled an incumbent DA.

In an unannounced but unsurprising appearance before the Hall of Justice in San Jose today, Deputy District Attorney Jeff Rosen stood with Lauren Chief Elk to denounce what they said was a bad decision by the DA’s office not to test evidence recovered in the 2007 De Anza rape case.

Chief Elk was one of three female soccer players who reportedly pulled an intoxicated 17-year-old “Jane Doe” from a room at a party attended by members of the De Anza College baseball team, where she was allegedly being gang raped. They were joined today by other rape victims.

In a rare move, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren announced this morning that she is throwing her support to Deputy District Attorney Jeff Rosen in his bid to defeat sitting DA Dolores Carr. “It’s true, I don’t get involved in local races very often,” she said after making a statement in front of the Santa Clara County Hall of Justice.

Unlike the San Jose Mercury News, which championed Dolores Carr’s opponent four years ago and has been unrelenting in its criticism of her ever since, Metro endorsed Carr in the 2006 general election. We believed an outsider would be healthy for an office with a succession process as ingrown and medieval as the Vatican’s papal conclave

Sadly, her troubled tenure has been plagued by rookie mistakes, judgment lapses and a tin ear for the appearance of conflicts of interest. And despite the edge she now holds in managing a county department, we’ve concluded that the less experienced Jeff Rosen will grow into the job faster than it will take Carr to repair the county’s damaged prosecutorial apparatus and restore its reputation.