More than 50 people attended a listening session Tuesday evening in Aurora to talk about the possibility of creating a civilian oversight group for the Aurora Police Department.

The session was led by new councilmembers Gianina Horton and Amy Wiles, who took questions from the audience to start about the costs and meaning of police oversight.

Talk of creating an independent oversight group for the APD is not new. For more than a year, protesters have attended every Aurora City Council meeting to demand action from the council following the police shooting death of Kilyn Lewis, who was unarmed and wanted on an attempted murder warrant.

In the first meeting under the new City Council in early December, multiple people during the public comment session asked for the creation of an independent oversight group.

Both Horton and Wiles included the creation of such a group in their campaign goals when they ran for the City Council.

APD is also still under a consent decree.

The decree, which the city entered into with the Colorado Attorney General’s Office in 2021 to implement sweeping changes to policing — notably in the use of force and how officers engage with residents — came after the death of 23-year-old Elijah McClain in 2019 while being arrested by three officers.

Aurora agreed to make changes after an investigation by the Attorney General’s Office found patterns of bias and excessive force in policing. The investigation also found a pattern of using the sedative ketamine in violation of the law by the fire department, which has since stopped using the drug but has to comply with related mandates in the consent agreement if it ever resumes use.

Proponents of a civilian oversight group say the consent decree is not enough.

There are more than 160 oversight agencies across the U.S., which is “not nearly enough for the number of law enforcement agencies there are,” Horton said Tuesday night.

Horton, who called herself “pro-oversight” Tuesday, said independent police oversight is necessary because it protects human rights, promotes constitutional policing, increases public confidence and trust in police, ensures greater accountability and enhances risk management.

City Manager Jason Batchelor said the city anticipates that APD will exit the consent decree in the near future, but that does not mean they are “satisfied” with where is stands, which is “why we’re here today,” Batchelor said.

Denver has an office of citizen oversight, and Independent Monitor Liz Castle said Tuesday that her body does not report to the mayor or to city council, although they work together closely.

In Denver, the office has what Castle called an “audit oversight” system, meaning their office reviews investigations into police misconduct rather than conducts investigations into misconduct themselves, Castle said.

Their office is funded in the mayor’s budget, she said, so they are “at the whim of the mayor” financially, but their funding has progressed over the years and sits at about $2.6 million, with majority going to salaries.

“We’re not anti-police, we’re here to make the department better and make the community safer,” Castle said about Denver’s oversight office. “It’s not just about bad policing, it’s about community trust … providing safety for community as well as law enforcement.”

Horton called the effort of creating an oversight board “a baseline,” adding that such efforts are being eroded across the country but that they are necessary.

No two civilian oversight groups are the same, Horton said, and another meeting will be held Jan. 29 to talk about how Aurora would structure theirs.