SAN JOSE — In its selection for a new civilian police watchdog, San Jose ultimately landed about 50 miles to the north.
Eddie Aubrey, currently chief of the Richmond Police Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, has been named head of the San Jose Police Independent Auditor’s Office.
Aubrey, who was the first OPA director 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 long 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 of the event.
In the meantime, retired Santa Clara County deputy prosecutor Karyn Sinunu-Towery led the IPA office while the city searched for a full-time replacement.
Aubrey brings a range of law enforcement and surveillance experience to this position. He served as a police officer in Santa Monica and Los Angeles from 1980 to 1997, when he earned a law degree from Seattle University. Aubrey worked as a prosecutor in the Seattle area, headed a public safety department at a community college, served as an interim judge and ran a private law practice in the two decades before he accepted the supervisory position in Richmond.
In the middle of that period, starting in 2009, he worked for about two years as a civil police auditor in Fresno.
“I am honored and privileged to take on the role of your next independent police auditor,” Aubrey said in a statement sent Tuesday morning from San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan’s office. “I look forward to engaging with San Jose’s diverse communities, advancing police accountability, and improving policing.”
Mahan added in the release: “Eddie will help maintain trust between our residents and those charged with protecting them. We are incredibly fortunate to have a new independent police auditor with extensive experience both working within and overseeing the conduct of law enforcement agencies.
The San Jose IPA office, created in 1993 as a compromise between city leaders who wanted a police commission and the police union that resisted the creation of additional civilian oversight, gradually expanded its footprint in recent years. In 2020, voters approved authorizing the IPA office to audit internal complaints against police — known as department-initiated investigations — and review use-of-force records by the police.
The move also gave the city leeway to take a greater role in police oversight, and the city explored the idea of moving SJPD’s internal investigations from the police department to the IPA office.
But that movement ultimately died down when the council decided 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 s is committed to increasing the agency’s staff and resources.
This is a developing story. Check back later for updates.
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