Do you really know all the facts in the ongoing public debate about San Jose police practices and arrest rates compared to other California cities?

Many have read numerous Mercury News articles, editorials, and op-eds, watched television broadcasts, seen loud, rancorous Council meetings, and personally know reasonable people on both sides of the public debate who have expressed strongly-worded feelings or opinions.

The essential first step in solving any problem — especially a complex, emotional controversy — is to “understand the problem” and its many interrelated topics so that everyone’s efforts will be focused on solving the problem, not continuing to argue over the question: “What is the problem?”

There are many different opinions, some of which are factually-based and some that are based on attitudes, feelings, and opinions that should be considered as part of any community solution.

Let’s look at a few new facts and discuss what they might mean:

Along with a story on the use of force by San Jose police in resisting-arrest cases (front page, Nov. 1), the Mercury News presented the bar graph below (which does not appear with the online article).  This graph shows arrest rates by racial groups but does not account for each city’s population or demographics:

As you can see from the graph, San Jose ranks second out of the cities listed in terms of overall arrests.

But when you use California Department of Finance population estimates to calculate the resisting arrest rate per 1,000 city residents, San Jose drops to fifth:

1.  Fresno 2.228
2.  Bakersfield 1.993
3.  Stockton 1.921
4.  Oakland 1.362
5.  San Jose 1.126

(For a complete table of comparative arrest data, click here.)

Of course, these numbers didn’t prevent the Mercury story from stating in the story that “San Jose charges far more people with resisting arrest, compared with its population, than any other major California city.”  Let’s hope they didn’t read that in Fresno.

Because the Mercury News graph included overall arrest percentages for Latinos, I examined those numbers using Latino population percentages to calculate the resisting arrest rate per 1,000 Latino residents in each city. This time, San Jose drops from first to fourth (see table).

While we don’t want to speculate as to why, but notice in the table that:

a.  arrest rates per 1000 and the rate of Latino arrests by population for Fresno (2.22/1.13) and Bakersfield (1.99/0.85) are substantially higher than San Jose's (1.12 / 0.72); and

b.  seven of nine Mercury News-selected California cities had higher Latino resisting arrest rates per 1000 than their percentage of Latino residents (data not available for San Francisco).

Instead of presenting only one set of numbers, which gives the reader an incomplete picture of the facts, the Mercury News — or the City of San Jose — should consider researching the causes of higher overall and Latino arrest rates as that would help us to better “understand the problem.”