Does anyone really believe that if police officers continue to leave the City of San Jose that crime will decrease? That logic is just kooky, but Mayor Chuck Reed and now San Jose Police Chief Larry Esquivel are manipulating statistics to get us to believe that.
Chief Esquivel wrote an opinion piece for the Mercury News this weekend that outlined the “fuzzy math” that Mayor Reed has been hawking, purporting that violent crime is on the downslide and efforts to do “more with less” are successful. The Chief is wading into dangerous political waters when he ought to be paying attention to his dwindling force.
Thankfully, along comes the fourth estate to set the record straight, along with actual, consistent crime statistics that show crime is not only NOT going down in San Jose, it’s higher in every category – rape, homicide, burglary, car theft, than every other major city in California.
The Mayor’s fuzzy math, which Chief Esquivel parrots, compares one month early in the year with a high rate of gang related crime, to another month later in the year with a lower rate of the same type of crime. But the months in between show a different story, as demonstrated by this story from NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Team.
Police officers continue to leave San Jose in droves because they know they can find secure, supportive employers elsewhere, who value their lives and the risks they take every day. “We have had to be creative…” said Chief Esquivel in his politically motivated opinion piece. But residents don’t want to play games with their safety. And police officers don’t want to put their lives on the line when they know they’re not valued.
This manipulation of numbers shows how far out on a limb Mayor Reed and Mayoral candidate Sam Liccardo, and now Chief Esquivel are going to fool San Jose residents into thinking everything is okay. It’s not.
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