Santa Barbara City Council Okays Spending $67K to Hire Police Oversight Expert
Hassan Aden Would Help Create a Civilian Review System
Editor’s Note: This story was updated on December 6 to clarify that the City Council has approved the expenditure to hire Hassan Aden but has not officially hired him yet. Comments and additional information from Tuesday’s council meeting have also been added since this story was first published.
The Santa Barbara City Council approved the expenditure of $67,000 to hire Hassan Aden, a professional Independent Police Monitor, to provide consulting expertise in “creating and implementing” a new civilian oversight system for the city’s police department. Aden spent 26 years with the police department of Alexandria, Virginia, which he left after attaining the rank of assistant chief. After that, he worked as chief for the Police Department of Greenville, North Carolina.
From 2015 on, Aden has functioned as a contract deputy monitor for the much-troubled Baltimore Police Department as part of a federal consent decree. While there, he focused on accountability measures. He has served similar functions in Chicago, Seattle, and Cleveland. He resigned from his post in Cleveland in late October after the federal judge overseeing that consent decree concluded Cleveland’s efforts at oversight, while substantially improved, still had not achieved substantial compliance.
