SAN JOSE — In what has nearly change into a ceremony of passage for anybody who steps in as San Jose’s unbiased police auditor, the most recent plea to broaden the scope and entry of the auditor’s oversight function has been soundly dismissed by metropolis leaders.
Eddie Aubrey is launched as San Jose’s new Unbiased Police Auditor by Mayor Matt Mahan, Tuesday, April 16, 2024, throughout a press convention at Metropolis Corridor in San Jose, Calif. (Karl Mondon/Bay Space Information Group)
Eddie Aubrey, a former cop and skilled police watchdog who has been on the job for simply over a yr, not too long ago printed his workplace’s annual police audit report highlighted by two notable coverage suggestions: for him and his employees to get a more in-depth have a look at police shootings as they’re being investigated, and to entry data of minor use-of-force incidents that make up the overwhelming majority of police pressure utilized in a given yr.
The request prompted unified opposition among the many police chief, mayor, metropolis supervisor and several other metropolis council members. They argued that preserving the integrity of felony investigations and the burden of manufacturing reams of further data on an understaffed police roster outweighed Aubrey’s rivalry that the present auditor construction prevents him from conducting extra significant oversight for among the most critical acts of metropolis law enforcement officials.
The rejection, by a unanimous council vote Tuesday, continues a historical past of town limiting the attain of its police auditor, who by design has no direct authority over police coverage. Previous auditors — and voters — have elevated what the workplace evaluations since its institution three many years in the past, however these modifications often got here slowly, and none have pushed the workplace past its advisory function.
This time, Aubrey requested town and police division for him and his employees to have a extra concerned presence on the website of police shootings and comparable crucial incidents. He requested for well timed entry to info, together with officer interviews, body-camera footage, and allowance for a walkthrough at a capturing website, as a substitute of getting a distilled bundle of data so long as three months later.
“This is a law enforcement exercise,” Joseph mentioned. “There is a tremendous amount of thoroughness, transparency, accountability and legitimacy. Yes, (Aubrey) is not involved from the outset, but I’m not really sure how that has hampered his ability to audit what it is that we’re doing.”
Aubrey responded by noting that the entry he’s asking for is more and more customary apply for civilian overseers in cities like Oakland, San Francisco, Fresno and Sacramento, the latter two cities being the place Aubrey and his chief assistant beforehand served as police watchdogs. He emphasised that any entry could be as an observer, not an investigator.
“This is not an outlier practice,” Aubrey mentioned to the council. “Meaningful oversight and sound criminal investigations are not mutually exclusive. … We are not asking for special treatment, we are asking for parity.”
He added: “Without that access, … what purpose does it serve for the IPA to respond to the scene if we are not permitted to observe, obtain or access any information that we couldn’t receive with a phone call?”
A council memo from Mayor Matt Mahan and 4 different councilmembers calling for the rejection of Aubrey’s suggestion acknowledged that “Civilian oversight plays a critical role in building and maintaining public trust, but it must be structured in a way that preserves the integrity of criminal investigations and makes prudent use of our limited public resources.” The memo lauded the present auditor association, and acknowledged that the urged change “would introduce operational and investigative risk and impose significant staffing and fiscal impacts.”
In an interview after the council assembly, Aubrey reiterated that his request focused “low-hanging fruit” and that it’s important to construct neighborhood belief within the wake of a high-profile incident.
“Timeliness of the information is what the public wants, and (the recommendation) gives an outside person that from day one, from the time of incident throughout the investigation,” he mentioned.
The council memo was additionally written in response to Aubrey’s request to entry data on all use-of-force circumstances, fairly than its present allotment of incidents that result in a capturing or critical bodily harm. His rationale is that critical harm circumstances solely account for 3% of general use of pressure, and that solely having abstract entry to the rest of situations leaves his workplace in the dead of night relating to figuring out areas of concern.
“All we see and can report on are the end numbers. Those numbers don’t tell the story,” Aubrey mentioned in an interview. “The 97% of other cases, we can see if there are patterns or trends with individual officers, with (a specific) use of force, or a policy that may confuse officers. That’s where you get change.”
However he added that he was not discouraged by Tuesday’s final result, and pointed to the council’s and police division’s acceptance of 10 different coverage suggestions, certainly one of which is to rely police shootings, in-custody deaths and civil misconduct lawsuits as department-initiated investigations — their time period for inside conduct complaints. The impact, Aubrey mentioned, is that his workplace will not have to attend for a neighborhood criticism to probe these issues. Different suggestions dealt largely with updating police oversight and officer accountability insurance policies.
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“What we’re going to focus on is doing everything we can with the authority we’ve been given, and exhaust that completely. We can do a lot with what we have now and with what we got yesterday,” Aubrey mentioned. “We’re still going to work toward those goals, and we’re still going to work with the police department. I’m really optimistic about where we are and we’re going to go with this.”
