SJPD's Summary of Cinco de Mayo Weekend Operations 2024

MEDIA ADVISORY 

The San José Police Department is dedicated to providing public safety through community partnerships and 21st century policing practices, ensuring equal protection under the law.

As expected, the city of San José drew large crowds throughout the weekend to celebrate the cultural holiday at many of the city sanctioned events. These city sanctioned events were largely successful, and the majority of community members and visitors lawfully enjoyed this cultural celebration that has been a San José tradition for decades. SJPD is thankful to our elected officials, community organizations, city leaders, and community members for including us in this year’s celebration. SJPD participated in the Cinco de Mayo parade and had one of our patrol officers perform in a custom SJPD mariachi uniform at the festival.

 

We proudly embrace and understand the significance this celebration holds for residents and visitors, and plan accordingly every year to ensure everyone can enjoy it safely. This year, SJPD provided Cinco de Mayo Traffic Maps a month in advance to allow residents and visitors time to plan ahead. As in years past, the Department took preventative measures to ensure the community could celebrate safely. In doing so, SJPD also employed zero tolerance for criminal behavior.

Through the weekend of May 3-5, SJPD monitored and participated in Cinco de Mayo festivities, while still responding to over 2100 regular calls for service. During the course of normal operations, SJPD observed several misdemeanors, felonies, reckless driving incidents, sideshow activity, and other quality of life crimes that required enforcement action in order to keep the peace.

While proactively patrolling impacted areas from May 3-5, SJPD statistics included:

Total Felony Arrests: 17
Total Misdemeanor Arrests: 52
Total Warrant Arrests: 18
Total Vehicle Impounds: 8
Total Traffic Citations Issued: 156
Total Firearms seized: 6

Illegal Activity and Diversions:

Historically, the Police Department has received numerous requests from residents and business owners concerned about unsanctioned gatherings and activities that would occur. The San José Police Department developed a proactive approach to reducing gridlock and crime that relied on strategic traffic diversions as a key component. These traffic diversions were only deployed when traffic gridlock was starting to occur, and/or when crowds started to become large and unruly enough that they presented a public safety issue.

This weekend’s sanctioned events were peaceful and well attended family events. However, the City experienced a high number of unrelated disruptive visitors who desired to create unsafe conditions for our Officers and the public. Among many other things, SJPD investigated a double stabbing event with life threatening injuries, numerous physical fights, multiple sideshows events throughout the city, an alcohol related vehicle collision where the intoxicated suspect driver collided with a patrol vehicle injuring our officer, assaults on patrol officers, vandalism to patrol cars, and multiple firearms arrests.

Due to the illegal actively and other safety concerns, SJPD deployed several traffic diversions to maintain public safety. SJPD communicated well in advance the anticipated closures and once again communicated the closures on our social media platforms in real time as the diversions were deployed. Once public safety was restored, the traffic diversions were lifted.

The San José Police Department welcomes and embraces cultural celebrations in San José and was honored to be included in this year’s festivities. We strive to keep these events safe for our entire community to participate and enjoy.

We look forward to continuing our collaboration with our community to build on this year’s success to ensure safer celebrations to come.