Santa Rosa police auditor riles City Council with homelessness critique

Santa Rosa may part ways with its independent police auditor after he found himself on the defense for criticizing the city’s efforts to address homelessness, saying they had made little difference to resolve the persistent problem.

Bob Aaronson, a Palo Alto attorney who embedded part time with the Santa Rosa Police Department in 2017, largely praised the city’s police force in his second annual report. But his “core observation,” as he told the city, was that “what we have done thus far to address the challenge of homelessness has not made an appreciable dent in the problem.”

Several City Council members reacted negatively to Aaronson’s assertion when he presented his report Tuesday night, and Aaronson stood by his observation. After that heated discussion, Aaronson now is unsure if his $231,000 contract will be renewed when it expires at the end of the year or whether he can continue to work with the council.

“I kicked over a hornet’s nest,” Aaronson said Friday. “I’m going to lose my job, and this is probably the most important work that I’ve done in the past 20 years.”

Mayor Chris Coursey said Aaronson’s reports have given the city some useful information, and he voiced appreciation that the Police Department was generally held up as exemplary in the auditor’s most recent report. But Coursey also pointed to the cost of Aaronson’s contract and Tuesday night’s tense discussion, saying the auditor had turned a positive into a negative by detailing his opinions of the homeless problem in Santa Rosa.

“When the council members challenged him he chose to argue about that rather than just move on and concentrate on the work of the Police Department on the whole,” said Coursey, calling the resulting back-and-forth “really unfortunate.”

Aaronson reached his conclusion that the city’s efforts had fallen short after joining Santa Rosa police officers on hours of ridealongs, including interactions with local homeless people, and meeting with local homeless activists.

“I’m not judging the quality of their (the city’s) efforts. I’m not judging the intensity of their efforts,” Aaronson said Friday. “All I’m judging is the result.”

His report noted that he “routinely” received citizen complaints about Santa Rosa police enforcement activities involving the homeless and that officers told him that policing the homeless was one of the most frustrating parts of their job.

After his presentation Tuesday evening, Aaronson was grilled by the City Council. Councilman Ernesto Olivares, a former police lieutenant, was the first to question the auditor’s familiarity with the city’s ongoing efforts to address homelessness, an inquiry that several other members would take up.

“From my perspective, Mr. Aaronson, (the report) moves into more of an editorial perspective on what you’ve seen anecdotally around the community,” said Olivares, the lone council member to vote against accepting Aaronson’s report. “And that’s a big concern of mine.”

Councilman Tom Schwedhelm, a former police chief who has been active in homeless outreach efforts, described the auditor’s report as “confrontational oversight” and asked about his understanding of specific city programs.

Councilman Chris Rogers called Aaronson’s writing overly casual and said he was concerned about “meandering thoughts” and “glaring blind spots” in the report.

Coursey at one point asked Aaronson whether he thought the money the city paid him would be better spent addressing other police needs, framing the question as a way for Aaronson to help him explain to the community why the city was paying him. Aaronson demurred, leaving the council to define the value of his work as Santa Rosa’s police auditor.

Aaronson told the council he was “very reluctant” to deliver his conclusion on homelessness in Santa Rosa “because I knew I would walk into this firestorm.” He said he would have neglected his duty by omitting his opinion and insisted that he didn’t need to be exhaustively familiar with the city’s homelessness efforts to make his point.

“This is a problem everywhere,” Aaronson said Tuesday. “If you guys think you’re solving it, I don’t know what to say. There are some times that I need to surface something, even though I don’t have every last bit of the information and it’s not squarely in my role.”

The city of Santa Rosa declared a state of emergency over its homeless problem in 2016, elevating the issue as a city priority and allowing officials to lift certain health, safety and zoning restrictions for temporary shelter. At the same time, the city last year began cracking down on homeless encampments across Santa Rosa, leading to a shifting cluster of camps that authorities have since sought to disband.

All the while, the county’s homeless population has increased over the last year for the first time since 2011, when it peaked at 4,539. The county’s February census estimated homeless residents now number nearly 3,000, up 6 percent from 2016.

No decision has been made on Aaronson’s future with the city, and it’s unclear whether he’ll deliver a report to the city based on his observations in 2018.

Aaronson on Friday said he was grateful for his time in Santa Rosa. While he acknowledged that part of his future is in the hands of the City Council - which has the power to renew, reject or amend his contract - he also has control over his own destiny.

“Why would I want to go through that again,” he said, “spending an evening in a confrontation like that?”

You can reach Staff Writer Will Schmitt at 707-521-5207 or will.schmitt@pressdemocrat.com.