About 50 people attended a roundtable session in Aurora Thursday night to discuss details about a future civilian police oversight committee for the Aurora Police Department.

Attendees included Aurora residents, several Aurora City Council members, Mayor Mike Coffman, City Manager Jason Batchelor, representatives from Denver’s police oversight board, and people who have attended council meetings for more than a year to protest against the death of Kilyn Lewis in 2024.

It was the second of two community-based sessions on the subject led by new Councilmembers Gianina Horton and Amy Wiles.

The first session was held Jan. 13 and was mostly informational as Horton and Wiles talked about different types of oversight groups and took questions from attendees.

Thursday’s session was organized as a roundtable, with attendees grouped off to discuss specific questions about the logistics of an oversight committee.

Councilmember Alli Jackson led the discussion at her table of five, asking questions like: “What is effective oversight to you?”

Members of the group, who challenged each other’s ideas, discussed various concepts for the oversight committee, agreeing that its members should get access to unedited body camera footage from police incidents within 48 hours.

Jackson’s group also discussed having the committee act as the public voice for police incidents, such as officer-involved shootings, rather than the police chief holding a news conference.

The groups also shared their main takeaways, which included desires for the committee to be based on transparency, accountability and balance.

One group said the committee should have the power to hire and fire officers, make budgets and have subpoena power.

Another group said it’s important to balance supporting officers, while also holding them accountable.

The next step, Wiles and Horton said, is bringing in Bonycle Sokunbi, the Fort Worth Police Department monitor. Fort Worth has a similar structure to Aurora, officials said.

Sokunbi was scheduled to speak this week, but Texas weather delayed the event. Officials are working with her and will announce a new date.

While the timeline for a committee’s creation is not yet set in stone, Wiles told attendees Thursday that “this is not a process that is going to take several years.”

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 death of Lewis, who was shot by a SWAT office. A team of officers had sought to arrest him on an attempted murder warrant. Lewis was not armed.

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 have insisted that 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 in the first public oversight meeting on Jan. 13.

Horton, who called herself “pro-oversight,” 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.