Marin has hired the director of the watchdog agency overseeing the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office to become its first inspector general, a similar oversight role intended to improve relations between community members and law enforcement. In the role, John Alden will work with Marin’s Civilian Oversight Commission, which was appointed last summer but has yet to dig into the details of its work. It spent its first year receiving training, drafting bylaws and helping recruit an inspector general. “Marin’s is a brand-new system, so it’s an opportunity to take some of the lessons learned from other parts of California that have tried putting together sheriff oversight and apply them,” Mr. Alden told the Light. “One of the things I particularly like about the system is that it’s been created in a collaborative way. It looks like all the key stakeholders—the community, the county executive, the supervisors, the Sheriff’s Office—have had a role in creating it.” A San Francisco resident, Mr. Alden has directed Sonoma County’s Independent Office of Law Enforcement Review and Outreach since 2022. Earlier, he served as executive director of Oakland’s Community Police Review Agency and held roles in San Francisco’s civilian oversight system. A graduate of the University of California School of Law, he began his career as a deputy district attorney in Marin. He sits on the board of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. Shortly before he began work in Sonoma, county voters approved a measure that expanded funding for the oversight agency. “We created a process for auditing cases involving civil claims against the county. We created a process for doing independent investigations into fatalities and whistleblower cases. And we helped our Community Advisory Council, which is like the commission you have in Marin, crank out a lot of policy recommendations in a collaborative way with the sheriff,” he said. Mr. Alden is set to begin his new job this month and will soon hold community meetings around the county. “Sheriff oversight might be especially important for West Marin, since almost all of the law enforcement services there are provided by the Sheriff’s Office,” he said. Because the sheriff is elected, county officials cannot dictate his policies, even though they approve his budget. Marin established the I.G.’s office and civilian oversight commission after the signing of A.B. 1185, which empowered counties to establish both bodies and grant them subpoena power to investigate cases of alleged abuse, deaths in custody and deputy-involved shootings. Yet that subpoena power is not absolute. At the top of Mr. Alden’s agenda will be crafting an operational agreement with Sheriff Jamie Scardina that outlines the scope of the information he will provide and procedures for sharing it.