Mayor’s Office Pre-Screened IPA Candidates before the Community Panel Interviews
By Raj Jayadev

A City Hall insider who wishes to remain anonymous says that there was an undisclosed pre-screening round of interviews conducted by the Mayor’s staff with San Jose Independent Police Auditor (IPA) candidates before the community panel conducted their interviews. According to the source, four candidates were eliminated after these in-house interviews. The whistle-blower is coming forward after the Mercury News reported that the recently hired IPA, Chris Constantine, has a brother in the San Jose Police Department.

The process, as described from previous explanations given by the Mayor’s office, coupled with this new information from the City Hall insider shows a pre-vetted and orchestrated hiring process that had selected Constantin well before the hiring process conducted its final deliberations.

The process went as follows. A private headhunting company called Bob Murray and Associates initiated the search for the potential IPA applicants. They received roughly 50-100 applications in the form of resumes and online questionnaires. Regan Williams, an employee of the company, and former Sunnyvale police officer, supervised the next narrowing down process. The group was distilled to sixteen candidates that Williams conducted personal interviews with, which reduced the candidate pool to eight.

That group of eight finalists were then screened and interviewed by the Mayor’s staff – Armando Gomez and Pete Furman. The undisclosed interviews were conducted on the second floor of City Hall on March 20, 2009 in the hours of 12pm to 4pm. According to the source, the Mayor’s staff, in hindsight, were “weeding out” candidates that appeared independent, and might challenge the views of the Mayor and the San Jose Police Chief.

This vetting process than produced four candidates pre-screened by the Mayor’s staff, which were then presented to the Community Panel for interviews. Chris Constantin, despite the disapproval of several community panel members, was then chosen as the new San Jose Independent Police Auditor.

Armando Gomez of the Mayor’s office could not be reached to confirm or deny the allegations of the previously undisclosed pre-screening interviews.