Week 9 - Ride-Along #2!

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog! This week, I’ll be describing the key highlights of my second ride-along and its implications for my project.

This ride-along was conducted with the SJPD and unlike my first ride-along, it was with a patrol officer. This is a key difference as I was in a marked police vehicle and with an officer who was actively performing patrol duties, unlike my first ride-along where the vehicle was unmarked and the officers were only responding to calls.

I started by meeting the patrol officer I would be riding with at the SJPD headquarters, from where he took me to meet his patrol team at a nearby cafe. After introducing myself to the team, we headed out to begin our patrol duties for the day. Before we started driving, my patrol officer opened his laptop and guided me through understanding how San Jose is divided for patrol officers. I learned that the city is alphanumerically divided into districts, with each officer being responsible for a certain district (ex: we had the district K2). Much to my surprise, these districts were relatively large, especially considering that there was only one officer responsible for each district. When I asked the officer why the districts were so large, he explained that it was primarily due to the extreme understaffing of the department. For example, at the time of our patrol shift, there were only around 35 active patrol officers for the entire city (keep in mind San Jose has close to 1,000,000 residents). This was a key takeaway for my project, as it highlights one of the primary reasons for inefficiency.

After learning about this, we began to move to conduct patrol duties. Our first action was to conduct a community foot patrol (CFP) in St. James Park, which is a hub for unhoused people and drug dealers. During this CFP, we arrested a man who was interfering with police activities by running in the middle of the streets despite several warnings. We soon came to the conclusion that the man may have been mentally-ill or on substances, and after searching and questioning him, the officers decided to put him on a 5150 (a temporary psychiatric hold for the mentally ill). A key observation I noted throughout this was that the process took over an hour, and during that time there were other priority calls that we could not respond to because we were occupied with this call. Although we had one more set of officers with us, we could not leave the scene due to the buddy system in place. This truly highlighted the inefficiencies that the SJPD has and made me wonder why officers tend to spend so much time detaining the unhoused and mentally ill rather than responding to calls where there is a larger threat.

For the rest of the shift, we proceeded to make one more arrest and respond to another call about a deceased person in a park. After this, I was dropped back to the headquarters where I had parked.

Overall, I found my second ride-along to be even more valuable than my first. I learned a lot about the inefficiencies of the police and the overwhelming amount of paperwork that police have to do for every call.

If you want to learn how these compare and contrast with community perceptions, be sure to come to my actual presentation! Thank you so much for reading this week’s blog, and I hope to see you here soon!

Until next week,

Ashwit