Cover of IOLERO report
photo credit: IOLERO

Mandates have been confirmed and leadership has had time to settle, but much remains to be done for IOLERO. That's Sonoma County's sheriff watchdog agency formed seven years ago.

November of 2021 to June of 2022 was a turbulent time period for the oversight agency. But a number of important changes have come since, helping to stabilize the body, like an agreement on Measure P oversight, and the start of IOLERO chief John Alden’s tenure.

"Our job is to review Internal Affairs investigations completed by the sheriff's office," Alden said. "We have some other newer tasks under Measure P we're implementing this year."

In November 2020, Sonoma County voters passed Measure P, which expanded IOLERO's powers. This week agency leaders focused on IOLERO’s work in those eight months across 2021 and 2022.

They also shared insights from the clearing of a backlog of audits dating back to 2017. Alden said the office provides insight into some important trends within the sheriff's offices investigations.

"The biggest one I see is the number of investigations found to be incomplete, or in which some portion of the investigation was incomplete," Alden said. "Of these 36, 19 of them, we found were incomplete."

An area Alden and Sheriff Eddie Engram, elected last year to lead the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department, both agree needs improvement: communications between the two agencies over investigations.

"The way that we would handle them internally weren't necessarily the ways that whoever was auditing a report would look at it," Engram said. "We are working on ways to come to a consensus on what is considered complete and what is not complete, and I think once we have that process down, the number of incomplete reports will decrease dramatically."

Engram said the sheriff's department has itself undergone a number of policy changes since the time period under examination.

"Including our de-escalation policy, which was added to the sheriff's office policy manual, transportation of arrestees, use of force policy, and our homeless policy," Engram said. "And all these policies were either added or changed based on comments from the CAC, or comments from IOLERO or IOLERO reports."

IOLERO’s CAC, community advisory council, has also suggested a number of changes to help improve conditions within the county’s jail and a re-examination of the eviction process to help prevent homelessness.

Alden said the upcoming months will be a busy time at IOLERO as they build out their investigation capacity.

"That would include civil case auditing, the whistleblower program, and independent investigations of certain kinds of cases as described in Measure P," Alden said. "We are hoping that by the end of this fiscal year we will reach full staffing for the first time."