Tasers, Beatings, & Systemic Abuse: An Inside Look At San Jose Police Brutality

Law enforcement in San Jose is taking heat for putting its citizens at serious risk. Between 1990 and 2000 San Jose had a higher ratio of killings by police to the overall homicide rate than any other of the largest 50 U.S. cities. In the wake of the killing of a young woman, shot for waving a vegetable peeler in her kitchen, tasers were brought into use by the San Jose Police Department, theoretically in order to lower the rate of use of deadly force.

A report soon to be issued by the Coalition for Justice and Accountability says that since tasers were introduced, the rate of killings by the SJPD, instead of decreasing, showed a dramatic increase. Additionally, from April until September of last year, tasers— which are potentially lethal—were used 90 times. Tasers were used on mentally ill people in situations that then escalated, ending up in two deaths at the hands of police.

In addition, an undercover agent, Michael Walker, is now on trial for the killing of Rudy Cardenas, who was unarmed when Walker shot him in the back in downtown San Jose a year ago.

The San Jose Main Jail, meanwhile, which houses 4,000 inmates, is a murky world of violence and abuse. For a glimpse at what goes on behind the locked doors of the Main Jail, Fault Lines acquired interviews with a former staff member, Nancy Rutherford, and a former inmate, Martín Rodriguez.

Nancy Rutherford has been a licensed vocational nurse for 38 years. She worked for two months at the San Jose Main Jail where she said there is a "wall of silence.” Her job was dispensing medications to two to three hundred inmates every shift. “They give a lot of psychiatric medication,” she said. “My take on it is that they’re chemically controlling a lot of people. Years ago they had rehab; now they’re more controlled, I think, by the psychiatric drugs. These drugs have a lot of side effects. They have to be monitored well and I question sometimes if they’re being monitored properly.”

She said psychiatric clients who are arrested face a “terrible experience.”

“From what I heard the police and corrections officers are pretty brutal when suspects are booked and received in the jail. These people, imagine, they come off the streets, maybe they drank on top of their other meds, and they don’t know which end is up. Then if you’re kind of brutalized and shoved around or whatever, it’s a pretty bad experience.”

“I think there could be a better way. Some of the corrections officers can be very condescending, abusive, isolating these people, putting them in solitary confinement; some of it to me is going overboard. You might almost get them into a partial psychotic state, being alone and treated like this.”

Rutherford told of helping one inmate when things went wrong: “One of my colleagues told me there was an inmate who needed attention. She said ‘Boy! They really hit him in the eye!’” Rutherford went to the inmate’s cell with ice, where she ran into some corrections officers. She was angry and she asked to “see the inmate that was assaulted?” “’What do you mean assaulted?!’” an officer said. She went in.

“There was a young fellow who had a Southern accent. He looked pretty together. He said, ‘Ma’am, they hit me, and I was handcuffed,” Rutherford recalled.

The corrections officers reported Rutherford to their commander. According to Rutherford, the commander told her, “We have to maintain a certain form of discipline here, you don’t want the prisoners to hear about dissention among the staff. You really have to watch what you say, because the news media may be around.”

Shortly afterwards, it all came together for Rutherford. “I walked out of there, and it was my father’s birthday. He’s deceased, but I remembered him, he loved the underdog. I thought to myself, ‘Hey, I’m out of this.’”

Looking back, she said “Some of the guards seem to have a vendetta, hurting people and being nasty. Some of them have that edge. You can see it. They don’t have a lot of compassion.”

“Everyone isn’t kind in there.”

Martín Rodriguez, a citizen of San Jose’s East Side, spoke in Spanish about his 115 days in the San Jose Main Jail, the worst ordeal of his life. It began in the early hours of last July 11, when he was trying to pull his twelve year-old son out of a gang fight. He and the child were arrested.

When he was being booked, police physically attacked Rodriguez. He said the reason they did this was a charge against him of supplying his son with drugs. (Later his son tested clean and this charge was dropped). In his cell Mr. Rodriguez was given painkillers for the injuries the police had caused him. After a couple of weeks they took him off the pills and he had a bad reaction. He could no longer sleep or eat, and he began talking incessantly. He began to hallucinate.

“I lost touch with reality,” he said. “I thought I was Cuauhtemoc, whose history I had read, and I thought I was Montezuma.”

Rodriguez was taken to the eighth floor of the Main Jail, the location of the mental ward. His family could no longer see him. He continued to refuse food and medicine; he had come to believe he was going to be poisoned. On August 22, he said, he was beaten and tortured.

According to Rodriguez, the following took place: He was pulled out of his padded cell by six guards who immediately attacked him. He was hit on the head and body with batons. They used all kinds of compliance holds on him, each intended to cause maximum pain. They tore off his clothes with such force he was afraid he would be raped. Then they dragged him to a wooden bed, where he was held down with straps on his wrists and ankles. At least one officer humiliated him by handling his penis. They had shields, which they pressed against his head, forcing it against the wooden bed, until he thought it would burst. He pushed back with his head, fearing that otherwise his neck would snap.

The abuse went on for many minutes. Rodriguez said there were a lot of people around. No one took his side. There was a female dressed in civilian clothes present, whom Rodriguez said laughed at his predicament. Others made jokes, he said, including a gay male nurse. “They break your body and your soul,” said Rodriguez.

“Psychologically,” he concluded, “I will never be entirely well.”

Rodriguez is seeking recourse. His public defenders have not allowed him to plead innocent to the charges against him: possession of methamphetamine and being under the influence. He hopes he can somehow get his own attorney, and also that he can get a decent psychological evaluation. The Barrio Defense Committee in San Jose has taken up his case, and they can be reached at (408) 885-9785.