Sonoma County’s civilian law enforcement oversight agency highlighted improvements in its latest annual report on the Sheriff’s Office’s handling of complaints and internal investigations, but the specter of an ongoing fight about the watchdog’s authority dominated discussion Tuesday during a presentation before the Board of Supervisors.

The 92-page report, for the 2024-2025 fiscal year, covered the first independent investigations into in-custody deaths, both at the county jail, and summarized citizen complaints and its audits of Sheriff’s Office internal affairs probes into alleged misconduct.

Speaking to the board, John Alden, director of the Independent Office of Law Enforcement Review and Outreach, noted “good progress on issues we’ve brought up to you before,” but looking forward called the recent stalemate over IOLERO’s investigative powers “our single biggest issue.”

In its own written response to the report, the Sheriff’s Office also credited the watchdog’s work in several policy changes it made, but described a year that became “more challenging than previous years in our relationship with IOLERO.”

IOLERO received 44 complaints in the reporting period — roughly a third concerning conditions in the county jail. The largest share, 22%, had to do with improper procedure or policy complaints. Other complaints dealt with reported discourtesy, neglect of duty, or use of force.

It received 37 internal affairs investigations from the Sheriff’s Office to audit.

In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, IOLERO completed 33 audits, compared to 48 the previous fiscal year, leaving a backlog of 49. The report blamed the backlog — a persistent issue for IOLERO — on the loss of an auditor, who has now been replaced. Another auditor was also hired, bringing IOLERO to eight full-time staffers for the first time. Its budget stood at just over $2.4 million for the year, tied to 1% of the Sheriff’s Office budget, as directed by the voter-approved Measure P in 2020. Since its start in 2016, “IOLERO has experienced multiple shifts in its administration and workforce,” the report said, but “may finally be settled into a structural stability.”

IOLERO found the Sheriff’s Office investigations complete in nearly three-quarters of cases, a significant increase from two-thirds the year before. The Sheriff’s Office rarely found policy violations in its investigations, and the watchdog agreed with law enforcement’s conclusions 85% of the time, a jump of almost 20 percentage points from the previous year.

“More than ever before, (the Sheriff’s Office) responded to our audits with additional investigation, explanations, or evidence,” the report said, even leading IOLERO to change its preliminary findings in several cases.

IOLERO said the Sheriff’s Office also improved the number of cases it investigated within the one-year timeframe necessary to impose discipline, a metric IOLERO began assessing for the first time. The agency is holding a 6 p.m. online town hall meeting on the annual report on Nov. 17.

On Tuesday, Sheriff Eddie Engram acknowledged some issues with timeliness but noted the staff at IOLERO “now outnumbers the staff at Internal Affairs.” “The number of cases coming in through IOLERO and the cases we’re getting internally have pretty much buried the unit,” he said, noting he added a third internal investigator after taking office without requesting extra staffing funds. “That may be something we have to look at.”

Independent investigations

The report covered IOLERO’s first two independent investigations, both into deaths — a stroke and a suicide — at the county jail in 2023. IOLERO reported full cooperation by the Sheriff’s Office and agreed with the department’s findings, including a few violations in the latter case. In both cases, the watchdog office evaluated only access to care and not its adequacy or substance or clinical decisions by medical and mental health staff, which it said were “presently beyond IOLERO’s expertise and resources.”

With the suicide death, IOLERO found that while staff assessed and collected mental health and suicide risk information, there were some failures in documenting, reporting and monitoring, including safety checks on the inmate without visually looking into the cells.

In a written response to IOLERO’s report, the Sheriff’s Office said it is clarifying the policy language to specify that “safety checks will be done by direct visual observation that is sufficient to assess the incarcerated person’s well-being and behavior.”

The Sheriff’s Office deemed “unfeasible” a recommendation that jail staff document safety checks of all people identified with mental health issues as thoroughly as they do for those in special sobering and observation cells. “Unfortunately, (the Main Adult Detention Facility), like most county jails, is the largest mental health facility in the county,” the department said in its response, estimating about half, or 300 people, fall into that category.

There is a pending federal civil rights lawsuit against the county over jail staff’s handling of the 2023 suicide.

IOLERO and the Sheriff’s Office also set up a system for the watchdog to issue and serve subpoenas, a new power granted by Measure P. But efforts to exercise that new authority — as part of an investigation into the fatal 2022 shooting of David Peláez-Chavez by a deputy and a stalled whistleblower probe — were challenged by the Sheriff’s Office and deputies, leading to heated public debate and an ongoing court fight. Those two cases are slated to be covered in IOLERO’s next annual report.

Recommendations

IOLERO’s Community Advisory Council, a 10-member volunteer panel that works to represent community views and concerns and build trust with the Sheriff’s Office, worked on research and policy recommendations related to canine use, community engagement, immigration and racial and identity profiling.

The Sheriff’s Office said it incorporated the council’s canine policy recommendations to develop a mission statement emphasizing the seriousness of canine force, define key terms used in the existing policy and describe actions handlers need to take when a canine doesn’t release its bite. The agency also is in the process of developing a stop-data-collection policy related to profiling.

IOLERO reupped a recommendation that video surveillance cameras be installed in all parts of the county jail, a project Engram said has been included in budget requests to the Board of Supervisors since 2020.

The Sheriff’s Office submitted its own recommendations to IOLERO, claiming complaints received from the watchdog sometimes lack important information or specificity that can bog down the department. The Sheriff’s Office also recommended IOLERO focus its audits on cases from 2023 onward to coincide with Engram’s term as sheriff and relate to more current policies.

Mounting standoff

Despite the collaboration cited by both agencies, the ongoing disputes over the extent of IOLERO’s legal authority and subpoena power cast a shadow over the report.

IOLERO noted a refusal to cooperate has prevented it from following through on its investigative mandate.

The Sheriff’s Office, in its response, cited “legal issues” related to Measure P and faulted IOLERO’s public statements for “continued inaccuracies” that combined “pose significant challenges in moving forward with constructive and collaborative conversations regarding law enforcement accountability.”

A lawsuit filed by IOLERO over the Sheriff’s Office’s rejection of subpoenas in the whistleblower probe is up on appeal after a Sonoma County judge originally sided with the Sheriff’s Office.

A standoff over whether deputies should have been forced to answer questions in interviews as part of IOLERO’s recently released investigation into the killing of Peláez-Chavez has led, on the one hand, the labor group representing patrol deputies to file complaints with the county and State Bar of California against IOLERO. On the other hand, the agency’s Community Advisory Council recently passed a resolution to censure the sheriff.

“As long as we have that fundamental disagreement, several of the things about independent investigations and whistleblower cases are hard to move forward on,” Alden said. The ruling in the court case, expected in the spring, “will answer that question for us one way or the other.”

In the unusually high number of public comments that followed Tuesday’s board presentation — split evenly between criminal justice reform advocates and sheriff’s deputies — most centered on the unresolved standoff. Deputies criticized Alden and claimed “trust has eroded to nothing.” Advocates called on the board to show more support for IOLERO’s leader and the mandate of increased oversight, approved overwhelmingly by voters.

Supervisors did not indicate any imminent plans to intervene or seek to resolve the impasse, pointing to the pending whistleblower case.

Several sought to turn down the heat.

“There are things that can be and have been improved by collaboration and cooperation between IOLERO and the Sheriff’s Office. I appreciate the work that goes into that. There are also things that probably aren’t going to be resolved without action by the courts or action by the voters,” Supervisor Chris Coursey said. “The sheriff has a few more years on his term. Director Alden just had his contract renewed, for those who wonder about whether he is supported. I expect both of you to be around for a while, and I encourage all the effort that has gone into making things work.”

You can reach senior reporter Marisa Endicott at 707-521-5470 or marisa.endicott@pressdemocrat.com. On X (formerly Twitter) @marisaendicott and Facebook @InYourCornerTPD.