For over 30 years, Chief Paul Joseph has served in the San José Police Department (SJPD) in California. Throughout his tenure, Chief Joseph has made community engagement and public safety his priority. With an understaffed department the SJPD found unique ways to serve community members.

Chief Joseph’s community is 30% Hispanic, over 40% of its residents are foreign born, and 57% of them speak a language other than English. Since January 2025, San José has seen a decrease in reports of crime. Chief Joseph believes that fear of immigration crackdown is a major roadblock to community safety and trust, because when communities fear engaging with law enforcement, they’re less likely to report crime.

Chief Joseph and SJPD decided to use AI technology to expand their communication capability and outreach within the community to reassure them that they should not fear local law enforcement. For example, a video of Chief Joseph speaking to community members was translated into Spanish through the use of AI.

The message in the video meant to assure residents that SJPD’s focus is on community safety, not immigration enforcement, and that no one should be afraid to report crime due to fear of deportation. “We’re never going to stop trying to build that trust and strengthen our relationship with the community, so if this helps people to feel that, when they need our help, they can call us, then it’s all worth it, it’s all worth the experiment,” Joseph told CBS news.

The below Q&A delves deeper into Chief Paul Joseph’s strategy to strengthen and maintain trust in San José.  

The chief’s responses have been edited for length and clarity.

How was the use of AI to communicate with community members received? 

In the heart of Silicon Valley, San José has been on the forefront of utilizing technology to increase public safety, while building trust with the community. The use of AI technology has generally been positively received with a healthy dash of curiosity. Measuring results is in our level of earned community trust. We work hard to earn people’s trust and in turn they come forward as witnesses or to report crimes. That trust has allowed us to maintain high levels of solve rates for major crimes. Using AI to disseminate information, provide resources or updates helps break through the noise, and the novelty of it allows us to reach a segment of the population that might not be paying attention otherwise.  

 What messages do you want community members who are worried about immigration enforcement to hear?  

We want community members to know that our priority is the safety and well-being of everyone living in our city, regardless of immigration status. The San José Police Department will not initiate any action to determine a person’s immigration status. Our officers will not detain, question, or arrest individuals for the purpose of determining whether they are undocumented. This longstanding policy ensures that everyone, including undocumented immigrants, can come forward to report crimes or seek help without fear of deportation or arrest. No one should ever be afraid to call us for help. When people feel safe engaging with their local police department, the entire community becomes safer.  

Do you think your video in Spanish addressing the community has led to less fear? 

To be clear there is a lot of fear right now, and it’s going to take a lot of sustained work on our part to reduce that by any measure. But we hope the AI video in Spanish shows the community how hard we are working to get our message out there. The video alone would not be effective if we weren’t doing so many other things to communicate the same message to our community. Doing it all together over a sustained period of time, I do believe is helping.  

What would you say to other local law enforcement departments interested in reaching a wider audience and building community trust? 

Ultimately, building community confidence takes time, but using technology that encourages multilingual communication can be effective when paired with other traditional efforts. In a diverse city like San José, no one will speak all the languages that are spoken in our community, so technology can help us bridge that gap. Law-enforcement sometimes fails to be at the forefront of innovation when it comes to technology, and I believe the pressures on our profession today require us to lead in this area in order to be successful.  

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The LEITF would like to thank Tanner Smith, Fall Intern, for his contribution to this blog post.