2001 Latino Heritage Local Heroes: Christopher J. Arriola
District Attorney of Santa Clara County
Christopher Arriola was born in Southern California and attended public school in the City of Orange. He is a fourth generation Mexican American with family ties in both Northern and Southern California. Mr. Arriola attended Stanford University and received a degree in history in 1992 with departmental honors. At Stanford he was active in the Chicano/Latino Community through various student organizations. After college, Mr. Arriola enrolled at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California Berkeley. While at Berkeley he was involved in numerous student and academic groups, including acting as Editor of La Raza Law Journal, a student publication at Boalt. He graduated in 1995.
After law school, Mr. Arriola went to work for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office in the fall of 1995 and was assigned to try cases in the South Central Judicial District of the County in Compton. While an attorney in Los Angeles, he was active in numerous community groups and bar associations. He was on the board of the Los Angeles County Mexican American Bar Association and was involved with local groups attempting to have Orange County schools named after Latino community leaders. He published a commentary in the Los Angeles Times and an article in La Raza Law Journal about a landmark Latino school desegregation case in Southern California, Mendez v. Westminster (1947)
In 1998 Mr. Arriola returned to the Santa Clara County at the District Attorney’s Office in San Jose, California. He tried serious felony cases including DUI with Injury and Attempted Murder cases. In the summer of 1999 Mr. Arriola moved to the newly established Community Prosecution Unit at the District Attorney’s Office. He helped shape the innovative unit that put Deputy District Attorney’s into blighted or under-served communities to try and reduce crime and improve the quality of life for residents. Mr. Arriola worked in the Burbank neighborhood of San Jose for the past two years focusing on quality of life crimes through Operation Spotlight and juvenile crime prevention and rehabilitation through the Restorative Justice Project. Operation Spotlight brings together various law enforcement and social service agencies that work in the same neighborhood to provide a unified and collaborative effort toward community safety.
Some examples include the prosecution of the Burbank Adult Theater in a residential art of neighborhood for the creation of a public nuisance around children and families in P v. North American Cinemas. The Sheriff’s Office made over 27 arrests just outside the theater in a nine-month period for indecent exposure and public drunkenness. The theater owners closed down the theater after Mr. Arriola negotiated a settlement where the theater would close and the operators would pay the local school district $7,500 for after school programs in addition to other fines. Mr. Arriola was also the first in the state to prosecute a landlord for criminal child endangerment based on the unsafe conditions at his San Jose apartment complex. The landlord served 30 days in county jail and was ordered to make needed repairs in P v. Reiter. Recently, Mr. Arriola was re-assigned to the Career Criminal Unit, prosecuting serial felons.
Mr. Arriola has also been active in Latino community groups and other civic organizations. He is currently President-Elect of California La Raza Lawyers and Chair of its Judicial Committee. Next year he will be President of that group after having served as President of the Santa Clara County chapter in 2000. In addition, he is on the board of trustees and the executive committee of the Santa Clara County Bar Association and serves as chair of its Minority Access Committee. Mr. Arriola is President of the Stanford Chicano Latino Alumni of Northern California and was a founder and chair of the Bailando por Burciaga Scholarship Dinner, which raises money for Latino scholarships at Stanford in the name of deceased poet and artist Jose Antonio Burciaga. He has been a member of the San Jose Police Cadet selection board and a co-chair of the successful Bernal for Judge 2000 judicial campaign. He is involved in numerous other groups including LULAC and the Hispanic National Bar Association. Mr. Arriola has acted as a student role model on numerous levels from elementary school classrooms to the law school moot court. Finally, the Governor recently appointed Mr. Arriola to the Governor’s Advisory Panel on Racial Profiling to study and develop guidelines and mandatory training for all California peace officers on this important area of concern to all of us.
Mr. Arriola values giving back to the community and believes that Latinos are underrepresented in positions of influence. In order to change the present imbalance where only 4 percent of attorneys are Latino but over 30 percent of the population, he believes we must all make a concerted effort to guide and educate our youth as well as ourselves to make a more inclusive society. He spends a great deal of his time advocating for the inclusion of Latinos in all levels of government, especially the judiciary, where only 70 out of over 1700 judges in the state are Latino and in District Attorney’s Offices where only 1 County in the state has a Latino in office.
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