Author: Aaron B. Zisser (Aaron B. Zisser)

Victims and survivors of violent crime are not a monolith. Indeed, the very nature of crime makes every individual experience unique. Those of us who advocate for criminal justice reform often come under attack for supposedly being insensitive to or disconnected from victims and their families. These critics are of course right that victims and survivors...

The hot San Jose summer must have fried Mayor Sam Liccardo’s memory. In an Aug. 15 opinion piece, Liccardo calls for more police officers and more incarceration as the answer to public safety concerns. He remembers back to protests in 2020, though glosses over the most important parts: righteous national and local outrage over police excesses....

Can a public defender be a district attorney? I am not endorsing any particular candidate. And each of the candidates for Santa Clara County DA has his strengths and weaknesses. I have met two of the candidates once or twice each. But this essential question has been floating around about whether one of the candidates, Sajid...

When Claudia was 10 years old, a San Jose police officer pointed his gun at her. Claudia—not her real name—had just walked home from school with her little brother and four other young kids. Now 40 and still a San Jose resident, Claudia didn’t tell me this at my office or in a meeting through a...

According to an outside review of the San Jose Police Department published in February, “Hispanic community members experienced a greater amount of independent use of force activities per event than their white counterparts did.” “Additionally, the injuries sustained by Hispanic community members were more severe than those sustained by white community members,” the review said....

As I discussed in my December column, the Charter Review Commission (CRC) recommended establishing an oversight entity that can investigate allegations of officer misconduct. An outside group of experts, the OIR Group, conducted a review of San Jose Police Department’s response to the May-June 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. That...

The vote by the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors last week to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into jail construction elicited collective head-scratching and gasps from the hundreds of community members who showed up to advocate for a different path. “What the heck just happened?” people asked one another. The folly After all, the...

New construction does not cure a broken jail culture. Outdated architecture didn’t kill Michael Tyree in 2015 and seriously injure Andrew Hogan in 2018; that abuse was the work of officers operating inside a culture of corruption and callousness accustomed to dehumanizing people who needed services, but instead received cruelty and neglect. Yet the County Executive’s...

The San Jose Charter Review Commission’s (CRC) recommendations last month to significantly overhaul police oversight will present a major test of the question posed in a recent Spotlight article: What do San Jose commissioners actually accomplish? But the crucial test is of the City Council because the commission developed eminently reasonable recommendations it then approved...

The goal for this monthly column, which starts today, is largely the same as it has been in my work as a federal civil rights attorney and police oversight professional, including as San Jose’s Independent Police Auditor (IPA): to carve out a platform for working with community members to identify, remedy and prevent abuse by the...