Inaugural Member of SF Sheriff's Oversight Board Resigns, Citing Agency's General Dysfunction

An inaugural member of the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department oversight board announced his resignation this week, citing ongoing hostilities and the board’s overall ineffectiveness.

In a scathing letter to San Francisco supervisors on Thursday, Jayson Wechter criticized the oversight board for not adhering to the established recommendations for ethical conduct followed by other oversight agencies.

“I felt very frustrated with the Sheriff’s Department Oversight Board (SDOB) and its failure to follow the principles, standards and ethics of the civilian oversight field,” Wechter told KQED of his decision to leave the board. “I no longer feel I really wanted to participate in an oversight entity that will not adhere to those practices.”

In his letter, Wechter said his resignation is effective as of Saturday, although the board said it had not received any notice of his departure.

Voters approved the creation of the Office of the Inspector General with the passage of Proposition D in 2020.

The following year, Wechter, who decades ago had helped form the city’s Department of Police Accountability, was appointed by the Board of Supervisors to serve as the new president of the seven-person oversight agency. His term ended in 2023.

When the new board first convened in 2022, its principal task was to appoint an inspector general overseeing investigations into misconduct within the sheriff’s office, a process that Wechter said was hindered by unnecessary delays.

Wechter said the board made the ill-advised decision to handle the search for a new inspector general itself rather than outsourcing that task to an independent recruiting firm, as the city had recommended.

san-francisco-sheriffs-department”]“In the end, the recruitment and hiring process for the Inspector General took a year, twice as long as the estimated time a recruitment firm said they would require, and the SDOB had only five qualified candidates to consider for interviews,” Wechter wrote in his letter to supervisors.

It wasn’t until December 2023, nearly a year into their search, that the board appointed Terry Wiley — a former assistant DA in Alameda County — as its first inspector general. But since then, the agency has faced major budget constraints, limiting its ability to effectively carry out its responsibilities, Wechter said. He also noted that Wiley is considering taking a judgeship in Alameda County in January and could soon resign, leaving the post vacant.

Despite his decades of experience working in law enforcement oversight, Wechter said, the board has continued to ignore his recommendations and has repeatedly tabled votes on whether to adopt a code of ethics from the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, whose board he also serves on.

Wechter also said the board voted to restrict its members’ ability to request information from the Sheriff’s Department, which he called “a deviation from oversight values and practices.”

“I was unprepared for the level of personal animosity and personal attacks,” Wechter said. “I think it created terrible optics for the public and also for people in the oversight community who looked at this newly established board and said they seem to be quite dysfunctional.”

Wechter’s departure comes as the sheriff’s department continues to face criticism for being understaffed and maintaining perennially overcrowded jails. Last month, Sheriff Paul Miyamoto also announced the closure of a controversial pretrial ankle monitoring program after a judge found his office violated previous court orders.

He added, “I have limited time, and I would rather invest it in areas of the oversight community where my work and my values are appreciated and where I feel they will have a positive effect. I don’t think that was happening on the Sheriff’s Department Oversight Board.”

When asked about Wechter’s resignation, a representative of the board said in an email that because the board nor its president had received any notice, they could not comment.