Zisser: Independent oversight can show more compassion

My new year’s resolution seven years ago this week — Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year and is being celebrated this week — was to approach the San Jose independent police auditor job with authenticity, to not let the inevitable politics water down my passion or commitment. I walked out of services, where something the rabbi had said crystallized this promise to myself, and I called my wife to tell her this, a few weeks before the job was to begin.

I understood this authentic approach to the IPA job would carry risks. I was naïve, though, about the full extent of the risk. I was also quite new to city government and, frankly, leadership. Reconciling my commitment to authenticity and independence with my desire to survive in a job that I also understood required me to remain neutral and objective, an obligation I took seriously, involved carefully navigating complicated politics and power dynamics.

Numerous other oversight leaders in the Bay Area and around the country have encountered similar resistance and hostility. The independence of my similar oversight position at Santa Clara University — reviewing allegations of discrimination and sexual misconduct and ensuring university prevention and response efforts — were also seriously compromised and stymied. My experience there was not unique.

Now in private practice as a civil rights attorney, I get to tell clients, “I believe you. What happened to you is awful. Let’s make this right.” As a neutral auditor or investigator, you can take trauma-informed practices only so far. I now work closely with my clients, as collaborators and partners. I pursue their goals. I bring them into the process so they can feel empowered and improve our advocacy. I want to give hope, be someone they see working hard on their behalf.

There are lessons that oversight agencies should take from the way public interest lawyers — and social workers and community advocates — operate. Indeed, I have always identified as a civil rights attorney, which is how I started my career and what I wanted to be when I was 9 or 10, and that background served me well as IPA and in other oversight work. But institutions will always be pressured to stifle or obstruct or undermine these oversight agencies, to compromise their independence, to sow distrust by driving a wedge between oversight and community members. The law will continue to be, in my view, the primary means of holding police accountable, the true independent check on institutions.

Of course, elected leaders and police chiefs need to empower and support oversight agencies and their leaders. Local universities likewise struggle with this. SCU, Stanford and San Jose State University appear to be rejecting the long-awaited opportunity under new federal regulations to abandon the harmful and unnecessary practice of holding trial-like hearings in sexual misconduct cases, which create distrust in the oversight office.

On the home page of the IPA website, there is a brief, dry report about the most recent SJPD officer-involved shooting. The person whom police shot is, in the summary, “an individual” and “subject.” By contrast, a civilian whom that “individual” shot is an actual “person.” The summary has not been updated to indicate that the “subject” died from his wounds.

Publicly dehumanizing those who encounter the police — yes, even those who shoot someone — is not the way for an oversight agency to build trust or show compassion. A family lost someone and is suffering. He had a name: Roberto Rivera. He was probably suicidal. While I would guess the IPA, whom I respect and is a long-time oversight professional, finds other ways to convey those things less publicly, my own personal resolution this year is to continue to engage in work and other advocacy with compassion, to treat people with the dignity they have, no matter what led them to a police encounter or to prison.

San José Spotlight columnist Aaron B. Zisser is a civil rights attorney based in San Jose (zisserlaw.com). He previously served as San Jose’s Independent Police Auditor and the Director of Equal Opportunity and Title IX Coordinator at Santa Clara University, investigated or oversaw investigations of police conduct in San Francisco and Oakland, and consulted on police, jail, and prison oversight. Early in his career, he spent more than five years investigating and monitoring correctional, mental health, and educational agencies as an attorney with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. and worked at a nonprofit civil rights organization in Philadelphia. His opinions are his own. His columns appear every first Friday of the month. Contact Aaron at [email protected].