America Votes Liberal, While San José Chooses Conservative

The sense of victory around the country that Democrats, who now make up a majority of Congress, will lead the country into a better place is not shared here in San José. Instead, our local election results feel like a turn for the worse with a new crop of elected officials veering to the right of the rest of the country.

In Santa Clara County and in San José it feels like we are getting more rigid, following the demeanor of our new Mayor Chuck Reed. This city has been hard at work sanitizing its image and cleaning up the areas where they want increased “wealthy” traffic and we finally have a Mayor to match the stone cold concrete walls of our new City Hall.

This is going to be a scarier city to live in and more people will be falling into this massive lie that San José has run with -- the “safest large city” in the United States. It is like a creepy twilight zone where no one sees the truth but a few. Yes, those numbers they present show that we are safe according to their criteria, but the real reason behind it is not that cops have a good relationship with the community, as a news reporter claimed on Channel 11 the other night, or that the community is doing a good job of policing itself. The fact is that we live in one of the most repressive cities in the country. That's why there's this false impression that nothing criminal goes on here. And that stern hand that ruled before, just turned into the iron fist with the incoming officials who are not on the public's side. They come from the place that views us as enemies, as threats and not as the people that they have to have the highest consideration for. On the council we have a former cop and prosecutor taking two seats. At the county level, it is likely that Judge Dolores Carr, our new Santa Clara County District Attorney, will have no consideration for the victims of police abuse. The kind of police abuse that is notorious in San Jose, so much that people not only in the city but from surrounding areas won't go into downtown San Jose (or San Jose at all) because they can expect to be harassed by SJPD. This impression of San Jose, though, doesn't ever make the 11 o'clock news.

What hope can victims or families have knowing that the DA is biased in favor of the cops and is not in favor of having open grand jury trials in cases of officer involved shootings? She hasn't been secretive about following the boys in blue in their code of silence and that's why every law enforcement association in the area put their weight behind her campaign. She comes in not looking like a servant of the public, but as another person with authority that will have a lying, corrupt officer's back.

San José proved with these results, perhaps, that it doesn't want scandal. That we want a reserved demeanor because we don't want to take anymore chances. But saving face is the easiest thing to do and not a part of this city's pioneering history. We've had too many firsts to be swallowed up by conformity. We have to notice who we put in charge the day we pressed a screen or were too busy to stand in line; and we have to challenge their power to remind them that it really comes from us and what we allow. The fight for a San José that reflects the heart of its people now seems like an uphill battle, but as the past year showed the world, privileged voters do not reflect the heart, soul or will of a people, and San José's voters don't reflect San Jose's soul either.