Jayson Wechter has been involved with NACOLE since 2004. He served on its Board of Directors from 2007 – 2014, chairing its Professional Standards, Conference and
Website Committees. He has been a member of the Training Education and Standards Committee (2020-present), Strategic Planning Committee (2017-2020), Membership
Engagement & Outreach Committee (2015-2017) and Conference Committee (2014-2015). In 2007, he drafted NACOLE’s Qualification Standards for Oversight Investigators and Supervisory Investigators, its first Recommended Training for Board and Commission Members, and played a major role in drafting NACOLE’s Code of Ethics.

Since 2021, he has assisted NACOLE’s Director of Training, to provide training for oversight boards and commission members in four communities by presenting on Effective Practices for Conducting and Reviewing Oversight Investigations. Jayson has forty-three years of experience as an investigator in the public and private sector. He has been involved with civilian oversight since 1982, when he worked on the community-based campaign to create San Francisco’s Office of Citizen Complaints (OCC, now known as the Department of Police Accountability). He began working at the OCC on its first day of operation in 1983 as a supervising investigator. While there, he established the first-in-the-nation oversight agency program monitoring police handling of protests. He wrote OCC’s first recommended change to San Francisco Police Department policy, mandating that officers display their star numbers in large, easy to read numerals on their crowd control helmets.

After leaving the OCC, Jayson worked as an investigator for the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office and operated his own investigative agency, primarily conducting investigations on behalf of indigent criminal defendants, including life history investigations in death penalty cases at the trial and appellate level. Jayson returned to the OCC in 1998, and over the next 18 years, he conducted hundreds of investigations, including officer-involved shootings, allegations of unnecessary force, and biased-based policing. Jayson designed the OCC’s training program for newly hired investigators and wrote many of the criteria used to evaluate investigator performance.

He also served as the union shop steward for the OCC’s investigators and administrative staff. Jayson is intimately familiar with the challenges faced by oversight agency staff and community members when the police union attempts to undermine oversight and political decisions negatively affect oversight’s effectiveness. Jayson worked for several years doing discrimination and harassment investigations after leaving OCC in 2017, but in mid-2020, following George Floyd’s murder, he decided to follow his true passion and return to oversight work. He went to work for the Oakland Community Police Review Agency (CPRA) for a limited term assignment investigating the Oakland Police Department’s handling of the George Floyd protests. After successfully completing that assignment, CPRA Executive Director John Alden asked him to accept a permanent position there as a supervising investigator, which Jayson happily accepted.

In 2020, Jayson worked with NACOLE members Cathleen Belz and Barbara Attard on crafting language for a ballot initiative to establish civilian oversight of the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department. After working on the election campaign for this measure, Jayson was appointed to the newly established San Francisco Sheriff’s Department Oversight Board, which will primarily focus on the county jails operated by the Sheriff’s Department.

Jayson has delivered presentations at NACOLE conferences since 2004 on Ethics and Civilian Oversight, Conducting Effective Interviews, Planning and Prioritizing Investigations, Assessing Credibility, and Investigating Use of Force, among others, and as a Board member, helped organize and shepherd many other presentations and panels.

Jayson received a bachelor's degree from Stony Brook University, with a major in anthropology and a minor in journalism. He has earned credentials as a Certified Practitioner of Oversight (CPO), Certified Criminal Defense Investigator (CCDI), Certified Legal Investigator (CLI), and as an Association of Workplace Investigators Certificate Holder (AWI-CH).
In his spare time, Jayson creates team-building treasure hunts in the San Francisco Bay area.