San Jose City Manager Debra Figone decided last week to end the suspense and remove “acting” from Larry Esquivel’s title as police chief, setting up a dramatic showdown. Not between cops and City Hall, though. An arsenal of memos over how to keep graduates of the police academy from jumping ship were fired off Tuesday. Just last week, it was widely reported that up to 17 cadets are taking their talents to different law enforcement agencies, leaving the city out about $2.9 million in training costs. On one side of the memo melee stands Sam Liccardo, armed with what he calls a “carrot and a stick.” On other other side stand Madison Nguyen and Johnny Khamis, carrying what they call a “first five” initiative. And in the middle, the police union is at the ready to shoot down both ideas.

Nearly half the class that graduated from the San Jose Police Academy a few weeks ago plans to leave for other departments, according to union leaders. And until the city offers a better disability pension plan to new police recruits, the Police Officers Association will keep encouraging cadets to find work elsewhere. On the opposite side of the experience spectrum, the POA is also telling retired officers to turn down jobs that would involve doing background checks on prospective officers.

Everyone loves applause—especially politicians. Yet leadership in difficult times often requires making decisions that don’t draw applause. It means having the independence to stand up for everybody, not just the loudest voices or the most powerful groups. When leaders have the independence to tell those groups what they don’t want to hear, it threatens the status quo. And threatened people yell. So, let’s take a breath, hit the “pause” button on the yelling, and start where we all agree. First, San Jose needs more police officers.

San Jose City Manager Debra Figone announced this week she will retire after overseeing city operations for six years. Her tenure, which will come to an end in December, has marked some of the most difficult years in the city’s history, as the City Council enacted layoffs and pay cuts to cope with historic budget deficits. Her departure will likely leave the city with an interim city manager, police chief and fire chief, all while the 2014 mayoral race is in full swing.

The Daily Fetch takes no prisoners—at least that’s what political consultant and lobbyist Dustin DeRollo told Fly when denying he has any role in producing the anonymous links blog. In the past six months, the Fetch—under new ownership—has taken a decidedly aggressive tone in going after everyone from Mayor Chuck Reed, his City Council allies and defeated county supervisorial candidate Teresa Alvarado to Metro and its staff. But one group that has received far less criticism from the blog is the organized labor machine and its elected allies, such as Cindy Chavez. So, when DeRollo’s name turned up as the quasi-editor of a PDF the site posted for a story last week, speculation in Silicon Valley political circles percolated that he and his business partner, Tom Saggau, have been orchestrating the site. Both men say that couldn’t be further from the truth, claiming DeRollo was improperly ratted out as a source for a story he expected not to lead back to him.

Breaking up is hard to do. Breaking up a fight between the San Jose police union and City Hall could be damn near impossible. In what appeared to be an effort to mend fences and remind people who’s the boss, Acting Police Chief Larry Esquivel recently sent an email this week to his command staff—roughly 50 deputy police chiefs, lieutenants and captains—scolding them for signing on to a letter critical of the city recent actions involving labor negotiations.

The San Jose Police Department’s duty manual serves as a bible of sorts when it comes to the rules and regulations for officers. In the 756-page tome that lays out procedures and protocol, five pages are dedicated to interviews and interrogations of witnesses and suspects. Nowhere in the duty manual, however, is there any mention of an interrogation technique that is now receiving criticism from the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s office and local defense attorneys: letters of apology.

UPDATED: Retired Judge John A. Flaherty denied pay increases for police officers in his arbitration ruling between the city of San Jose and the Police Officers Association, refusing to restore wages that were cut by 10 percent in 2011.

The Government Attorneys Association (GAA) held a special meeting Friday, and sources tells San Jose Inside that if the county attorneys agreed upon anything, it’s that a “deep division” exists amongst the membership. The big question is how can this be resolved when the union’s leadership continues to focus on scoring fleeting political points.

The Fair Political Practices Commission awarded a cookie last week to Cindy Chavez, champ of Tuesday’s county supervisor primary. FPPC Chief Enforcement Officer Gary Winuk ruled that mass mailers shared between Chavez, the county Democratic party and the South Bay Labor Council followed the Political Reform Act to the letter, which must mean it was written in some kind of Cyrillic and Arabic scramble. Part of the ruling stated that anyone who registers with a party is considered a member, even if they don’t pay dues, which means a party’s candidate of choice basically has an unlimited amount of coordinated funds at their disposal.

San Jose’s police union filed a lawsuit challenging the city’s authority to impose pension reform. The complaint was filed Monday, a little more than a week after Attorney General Kamala Harris agreed to let the Police Officers Association file for a judicial review.

UPDATE: The city of San Jose came to an agreement on tier-2 retirement benefits with the POlice Officers Association on Thursday afternoon, avoiding Friday’s arbitration hearing.

San Jose faces a $2.9 billion unfunded liability in pension and retiree healthcare costs. The figure is mind-boggling. The city still has to figure out how to afford those unfunded obligations. But that’s another story for another time. On Friday morning, the public—for the first time—will have a chance to sit in on arbitration hearings that have been held previously behind closed doors, when the city negotiators sits across the table from San Jose’s police union.

The office of Attorney General Kamala Harris granted the San Jose police union’s request for a judicial review of Measure B, the controversial pension reform ballot measure voters passed last year.

Larry Esquivel inherited San Jose’s chief of police position without ever putting his name up for consideration. In fact, none of the San Jose Police Department’s deputy chiefs showed a genuine interest in the job, leaving the applicant pool to some uninterested and/or unqualified candidates outside of the area. But Esquivel is learning the ropes, and a perusal of his Twitter account shows a man who loves emoticons, classic cars and ... the Mercury News? Yes, the Mercury News.

The deadline for semi-annual campaign disclosure forms covering the last half of 2012 came due last week. The documents provide a clearer picture of how winning and losing candidates raised money and how they spent it—or misspent it—in the final weeks of the campaign. We also tracked a number of political action committees (PACs). The most interesting findings: How much money was wasted in trying to defeat Councilmember Rose Herrera, a potential quid pro quo between the ChamberPAC and a person quoted in its ballot statement against minimum wage, and hangover debt for losing candidates Jimmy Nguyen and Robert Braunstein.

The city recently acknowledged that it was missing thousands of emergency response times when calculating how long it takes first responders from the San Jose Fire Department to arrive on scene. Robert Sapien, president of San Jose’s firefighters union, explains in an op-ed why emergency response times matter not only in life and death situations, but also when calculating the city’s budget.—Editor