The leaders of San Diego's police oversight board want community input as they search for a deputy executive director.
In addition to being the back-up to the Commission on Police Practice's executive director, this person will be in charge of community outreach, said Patrick Anderson, the board's interim commissioner.
"One of the things that the community really wanted to make sure happened with the hiring of these staff positions is that they would have direct, concrete, real input into the positions themselves and the hiring of people to fill those positions," Anderson said.
Anderson wants residents to fill out a short survey and for community groups to nominate members to be on a hiring committee. That committee will meet with each of the finalists for the position, and then will provide feedback and recommendations to the commission.
Commission members will decide on the hiring committee members during its meeting beginning Thursday at 3:30 p.m, with the priority being to include a broad diversity of community groups, Anderson said. He added that anyone interested can email him at PatrickA@sandiego.gov.
Passed by voters in 2020, the Commission is still waiting on an implementation ordinance to make its way through the meet-and-confer process with the San Diego Police Officers Association, the city's police union. Until that is finalized, the board can't bring on new commissioners, which is leading to a case backlog.
"This long pandemic and the lockdown and so on means that among commissioners, the case load is currently so high, largely because we were shut out of case review for the first six months of the pandemic, so we have a backlog," Anderson said. "Not only do we have a much larger caseload than usual, but we have many fewer commissioners than usual."
