SAN JOSE — Retired longtime prosecutor Karyn Sinunu-Towery has been appointed to serve as acting Independent Police Auditor for San Jose following the sudden departure of the previous auditor, the city announced Tuesday.
Sinunu-Towery, who retired as a Santa Clara County Assistant District Attorney in 2013, steps in for Shivaun Nurre, who had worked in the IPA’s office for nearly two decades in various roles before being appointed to head the agency in 2018. Nurre was renewed for a four-year term in 2021, which means there are about two more years left in the current term.
Nurre’s intent to retire as IPA was never widely announced, and no news release was issued by the city after it was reviewed by the City Council in closed session earlier this month. The council unanimously approved Sinun-Towery’s appointment in closed session Tuesday, according to the city.
In a statement, Mayor Matt Mahan said Sinunu-Towery “will bring stability and continuity” to the office while the city conducts a search for a permanent auditor.
“In leading the office, Karyn will draw on her extensive and highly respected public service career, including her time as Assistant District Attorney and her work with the Innocence Project,” Mahan said. “Karyn has always put rule of law and the pursuit of truth and justice at the center of her work, and I’m confident she will bring these values to this role.”
Sinunu-Towery said in a statement Tuesday that “I am honored to serve the City of San Jose as the Acting IPA. I believe the Office of the IPA serves a crucial city function in promoting public confidence in law enforcement through policy work and accountability measures.”
Sinunu-Towery steps in as the seventh person to serve as IPA for San Jose since the city established the office in 1993. She is the first prosecutor and second person with a law-enforcement background to take the role, following inaugural auditor Teresa Guerrero-Daley, a former special agent for the Drug Enforcement Agency who became a trial-court judge after being IPA for more than a decade.
The other five people to serve as police auditor had more explicit police accountability and oversight backgrounds. It’s a point that Raj Jayadev, co-founder of the police watchdog and civil rights group Silicon Valley De-Bug, immediately raised upon hearing about the new interim appointment.
“The idea of appointing a career prosecutor whose job it is to incarcerate people, and work side by side with police, to now monitor and hold police accountable is preposterous. I couldn’t think of a more contrary role,” Jayadev said. “It shows an utter lack of understanding of the need for true oversight that a city council would make this decision.”
Among the highlights in Sinunu-Towery’s three-decade career as a county prosecutor are her authorship of the Victims’ Rights Handbook that is now a standard text for state prosecutors, and creating the state’s first child-abuse protocol for investigating child death and sexual abuse cases. She was also hailed as one of the South Bay’s top trial prosecutors, and prior to her retirement she secured the conviction of former county Supervisor George Shirakawa Jr. for corruption-related crimes including gambling with public funds and duping political donors whose campaign contributions he siphoned off into a secret slush fund.
In her post-retirement career, Sinunu-Towery volunteered with the Northern California Innocence Project, based at the Santa Clara University School of Law, which she previously wrote was inspired in part by her experience getting a first-degree murder conviction — secured by her office — overturned in 2003 after doubts were raised about a testimony deal between a key witness and police.
Nurre served in the IPA’s office for 17 years, primarily as the second-in-command but including several interim stints leading the agency before she was promoted to be the permanent IPA in 2018. She helmed the office through multiple controversies involving the San Jose Police Department, perhaps most notably when SJPD garnered national scorn for its violent response to George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020.
Throughout her tenure, she was viewed as a steadfast monitor who quietly pushed the department to improve its internal investigations of officer misconduct while staying in the good graces of city and police leaders. Most of the public tension her office drew was because of high-profile city efforts – including a successful ballot measure – to expand the footprint of the IPA, headlined by a polarizing proposal to permanently shift internal affairs investigations out of SJPD and into the direct purview of Nurre’s office.
Her tentpole policy positions included pressing the police department to treat instances in which officers drew and pointed their firearms as incidents of force, and broadly urging the department to improve the breadth of IA investigations, which she contended gave too much deference to officers accused of misconduct.
The city said in its formal announcement that Sinunu-Towery, who is married to county Superior Court Judge James Towery, could start work as soon as next week.
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Source: www.mercurynews.com