T. Jack Morse was hired this week as Santa Ana’s first police oversight director, filling a position created years ago to increase accountability within the city’s police department.
Without a director, the Police Oversight Commission, made up of seven Santa Ana residents appointed by the City Council, has been largely unable to fulfill its duties. The ordinance tasks the director, now Morse, with investigating serious misconduct at the commission’s direction, including deadly police shootings, in-custody deaths and allegations of bias or excessive force, and recommending policy changes. But his role — and what the commission is allowed to do — could soon be reduced under changes the City Council is considering.
Morse, a longtime civil rights attorney and active reserve officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, says his position isn’t about shifting power away from police, but about making their work more transparent to the public.
“Oversight is more than just investigating individual officers,” he said. “Progress in policing comes from looking at the police department as a whole, looking at policies, looking at training.”
Morse says his job is to hold the police accountable, not just by reviewing misconduct complaints, but by identifying systemic failures in how officers are trained and policies are written.
“Problems in police departments are often not rooted in individual investigations,” he said. “They are grounded in poor policies and training, and Santa Ana’s Police Oversight Commission is poised to address those issues.”
“It’s my expectation that we will be reviewing police department policies, protocols, procedures, practices,” he added. “We’ll be identifying any problems that currently exist within the police department, and we’ll be making those issues public.”
Morse, a senior attorney at Oppenheimer Investigations Group, was appointed Tuesday, July 1, under a two-year contract worth up to $250,000. His hiring — a long-awaited milestone in the city’s push for police accountability — comes after the Santa Ana City Council approved the commission in 2022 to provide civilian oversight of the city’s police force. The commissioners were chosen and started meeting last year.
But within hours of his appointment, the City Council was set to debate a rewrite of the very ordinance that created the commission.
The item was ultimately postponed to the July 15 meeting due to time constraints.
Among the proposed changes, the word “independent” is struck throughout the ordinance, including from the title of the police oversight director. The commission would only be allowed to review cases involving in-custody deaths or potential violations of First Amendment rights. Any other complaints would be sent directly to the police chief, bypassing the commission, if the changes are approved. The commission would also lose the ability to investigate any cases that haven’t already been reviewed and confirmed as misconduct by the police department.
The changes, city officials say, are designed to ensure legal compliance with state law and streamline oversight procedures. But critics say they come at the cost of transparency and public trust.
“I cannot help but think, is this a coincidence that the City Council is voting to hire an oversight director, and we’re now seeing these amendments pop up,” Commission Amalia Mejia said. “These do not improve transparency, rather turn the commission into a symbolic act for the council to say, ‘Hey, we established one,’ without any actual Santa Ana PD accountability.”
Morse said, regardless of the exact oversight model the city adopts, “effective oversight will occur.”
“Change comes from transparency,” he said the morning after his appointment. “And based on the oversight structure that the City Council envisions with these proposed revisions, the Police Oversight Commission will be releasing public reports assessing and analyzing the police department’s Internal Affairs investigations.”
“Where those investigations are deficient,” he added, “we, as a police oversight commission, and I as oversight director, will document why they are deficient, and we will provide clear recommendations as to how those deficiencies can be addressed.”
Morse said it’s not unusual for oversight bodies to only review cases after the police department has completed its own investigation.
“If you look at the LAPD, the inspector general uses the exact same model. LA County sheriff, same model. Long Beach, Pasadena, Orange County, those oversight bodies use the Internal Affairs auditing model,” he said. “And one reason for that is you want to build the community’s trust in the police department. The goal is not to build the public trust in the oversight commission.”
The idea, he said, is not to displace the police department, but to build public confidence in its operations.
“Think about the police department as a whole,” he said. “Police departments write their own policies, police officers train other officers, and so it’s impractical to think that we can outsource all of those things to an outside entity.”
“If you’re taking responsibility away from the police department and essentially saying the police department can’t do this, the police department can’t be trusted to do that, that can be counterproductive,” Morse continued. “So I think in order to build public trust in the police department, you work with the police department to make whatever changes are necessary so that the police department is trustworthy.”
Morse acknowledged that Santa Ana, like many communities across the country, continues to experience deep distrust between law enforcement and residents.
“Communities do not trust the law enforcement officers who police them, and law enforcement officers often feel unwelcome by the people they are sworn to protect, and maybe they are unwelcome,” Morse said. “It can be difficult to bridge that gap … and I’ve lived in both worlds.”
Morse spent nearly eight years in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, investigating police departments, jails and other government institutions under both Obama administrations and the first Trump administration. He later led investigations into the Orange County Sheriff’s Department while working for the county’s Office of Independent Review. Still, his identity as an active LAPD reserve officer has raised some eyebrows in Santa Ana, a city with a long and often tense relationship with its own police force.
But Morse said he hopes to use those experiences to foster understanding.
“I think those experiences can help me facilitate trust and communication between the police department and the community that it serves,” he said.
But some commissioners and community members say the proposed ordinance amendments undercut the very purpose of civilian oversight.
Carlos Perea, another commissioner, called the revisions “a troubling effort to centralize power within City Hall and SAPD, shield the department from accountability and silence community voices.”
“The commission would be relegated to a passive role with no power to act, effectively turning it into a rubber stamp,” he said.
Community advocate Bulmaro Vicente, with the group Chispa, said that the original ordinance had already been vetted to comply with state law.
“These proposed changes aren’t about legality, they’re about politics,” he said.
Commissioner Mejia questioned the idea of spending hundreds of thousands on an oversight director while proposing to strip the commission of its teeth.
“How unreasonable is it to be willing to pay $250,000 on salary for an oversight director but not have a proper commission working to actually address the issues it was intended to?” she asked.
Councilmember Jessie Lopez said she believes Morse is well-positioned to serve as a watchdog, as long as the council allows him to act independently.
“We should keep the director independent and respect the spirit of the ordinance,” Lopez said in an earlier interview. “Our community deserves real accountability and transparency. Now that the independent director is essentially being offered a contract to take on this role, I hope the commissioners are willing to learn and work with him.”
Perea echoed that sentiment.
“I’m hoping the director is able to maintain unbiased judgment when engaging with all the stakeholders,” he said. “He’s going to have a critical role in bringing all voices together. The main thing here is accountability.”
Morse, for his part, said his job will be to bring that accountability into public view.
“As that police department becomes more trustworthy and gains that public trust,” Morse said, “that’s when the Police Oversight Commission is really serving its function.”