SAN JOSE — In its selection for a new civilian police watchdog, San Jose ultimately landed about 50 miles north.
Eddie Aubrey, currently head of the Office of Professional Accountability in the Richmond Police Department, has been appointed to lead San Jose’s Office of the Independent Police Auditor.
Aubrey, who was the inaugural OPA manager in Richmond when that office was established in 2016, becomes the seventh person to serve as permanent IPA in San Jose. He succeeds Shivaun Nurre, who ended a lengthy career in the office last year following a controversial encounter at the San Jose Greek Festival in which she drunkenly accosted police officers working at the event.
In the interim, retired Santa Clara County Assistant District Attorney Karyn Sinunu-Towery has headed the IPA’s office while the city searched for a full-time replacement.
Aubrey will take over the position on May 6.
He brings an array of law enforcement and oversight experiences to the role. He served as a police officer in Santa Monica and Los Angeles from 1980 to 1997, the year he earned a law degree from Seattle University. Aubrey worked as a Seattle-area prosecutor, led a community college public safety department, served as a pro tem judge, and ran a private law practice in the two decades before he took the Richmond oversight job.
In the middle of that, starting in 2009, he served about two years as a civilian police auditor in Fresno.
“I am honored and privileged to assume the role of your next Independent Police Auditor,” Aubrey said in a statement sent Tuesday morning by San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan’s office. “I look forward to the opportunity to engage with the diverse communities in San Jose, advancing police accountability and enhancing police services.”
Mahan added in the statement: “Eddie will help maintain trust between our residents and the people tasked with protecting them. We’re incredibly fortunate to have a new Independent Police Auditor with extensive experience both working within and overseeing the conduct of law enforcement agencies.”
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San Jose’s IPA office, established in 1993 as a compromise between city leaders who wanted a police commission and the police union that resisted creating additional civilian oversight, has gradually expanded its footprint in the past few years. Voters in 2020 approved authorizing the IPA’s office to audit internal police complaints — known as department-initiated investigations — and review police use-of-force records.
That measure also gave the city latitude to take on a larger role in police oversight, and the city explored the idea of moving SJPD internal investigations out of the police department and into the IPA’s office.
But that movement ultimately died out with the council deciding last fall to preserve the current system — in which the office makes policy recommendations but has no power to compel the police department to adopt them — and pledging to increase the agency’s staff and resources.
This is a developing story. Check back later for updates.