Naked City

On July 16 Iris Jones, the city's first-ever police monitor, tendered her resignation to city officials, effective Aug. 31. Jones is not only leaving her job but also leaving Austin, headed for Washington, D.C., where she said she is accepting a position with the Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld law firm as a client-services adviser. Jones, who has lived in Austin for 26 years, was a city attorney from 1983 to 1992, then returned to City Hall as police monitor last January. Jones disclaimed any dissatisfaction with the job, but her resignation, on the heels of a tense first year for the Office of the Police Monitor, has already generated its share of water-cooler speculation about the future of civilian police oversight in Austin.

Jones' office first sparked controversy last summer, less than six months after she began work, after the fatal police shooting of Sophia King by Officer John Coffey. Some in the APD rank-and-file felt the OPM's decision -- made by the citizen review panel that Jones oversees -- to call for an independent investigation of the shooting proved that the civilian office didn't understand the basics of police work. Jones never pushed to have the panel's unanswered questions reviewed by the department, which many think should have happened before the city dished out $40,000 to have a Dallas lawyer open an independent probe. (APD Chief Stan Knee could have halted the King probe but instead made the politically more palatable choice of accepting the panel's recommendation.) The incident set the tone for relations among Jones' office, APD brass, and the police union -- a network of uneasy relationships that have intermittently been public, mainly through terse comments in the local media.

Last month's shooting death of Jessie Lee Owens represents the OPM's second foray into a high-profile police shooting -- and, unlike the King shooting, the general circumstances of Owens' death are likely to produce more -- and perhaps more valid -- questions for the monitor and panel to review. As of press time the APD investigation into Owens' death was ongoing; the case will be forwarded to a grand jury and only thereafter move to the OPM -- perhaps not arriving there until after Jones leaves in September. Assistant Police Monitor Al Jenkins will be Jones' interim successor while the city searches for her replacement; under the terms of the city's current contract (adopted in March 2001) with the Austin Police Association, which created the civilian oversight system, both the police monitor and the members of the review panel are chosen directly by City Manager Toby Futrell, not by the City Council or APD brass.

That contract expires in September, and the city and the APA have just started the next round of "meet and confer" negotiations for the next one. Given the city's current fiscal situation, there's no real money on the table, so issues related to civilian oversight are likely to take center stage -- which means whoever replaces Jones may face a substantially different job than the one she's leaving behind.