SAN JOSE — LaDoris Cordell, the city’s Independent Police Auditor, will step down this summer after a five-year term where she used her political acumen and force of personality to scrutinize police conduct and push the San Jose Police Department toward more progressive policies in race and community relations.

Cordell, 65, of Palo Alto, is the city’s third IPA since the office was created in 1993. Her departure, effective July 3, was announced Wednesday by the city, which has a little more than three months to search for and appoint a successor.

“It’s time for someone to come in, with a lot of energy. What I do is not what they have to do, but I hope they will continue our trajectory,” she said.

As Northern California’s first African-American female judge and a former vice provost at Stanford University, Cordell brought unprecedented stature to the modestly empowered office and is considered to have been more visible and effective than her predecessors. She has been outspoken in advocating for police reforms and reaching out to minority and immigrant communities who have long distrusted law enforcement.

“Right now there’s very little sunshine in policing, and I’m not just talking about San Jose,” Cordell said. “With sunshine comes accountability, and with that comes trust. The only way to get it is transparency.”

That routinely put her at odds with a large portion of the police rank-and-file and the San Jose Police Officers’ Association, which since her 2010 appointment approached her with suspicion and openly questioned her objectivity given her ties to civil-rights organizations that have historically criticized police. When she came on board, the department was mired in accusations of racial profiling, particularly by the Latino community, which data showed was being disproportionately cited for public intoxication in the downtown entertainment zone.

Many of the objections to Cordell stem from a view within the force that her office serves the same purpose as the department’s Internal Affairs division, and that the department isn’t obligated to accept any of her recommendations.

In promoting civilian police oversight, Cordell — who while a Palo Alto councilmember created a similar position in that city — combined political pressure with meticulous annual reports that often argued the department didn’t do enough to hold officers accountable.

“It’s still my position that it’s not up to the city council or our office to micromanage the police department,” she said. “They have adopted almost all of our recommendations, and that didn’t happen because they got browbeaten. They were reasonable recommendations.”

SJPD Chief Larry Esquivel, the third chief to oversee the department with Cordell as auditor, lauded her approach.

“I have valued her insight, perspective and partnership in helping us enhance our community relationship. Judge Cordell’s expertise will be missed by our department, and the community,” Esquivel said in a statement.

Cordell often oscillated between criticism and couched sympathy for police, especially as the force shrank by more than 30 percent since 2008. She has said the public does not always have a deep-enough understanding of the daily challenges facing officers. And her years-long push to get cops equipped with body cameras was not only borne with the aim of cleaning up police behavior, but also to quickly quash unsubstantiated complaints by members of the public.

“What I think she showed is that the relationship between police and the people who want to make sure no lines are being crossed can be done in a very smart, clear way that doesn’t feel like combat, and doesn’t feel like backing down,” said Raj Jayadev of Silicon Valley De-Bug, a local civil-rights group. “She created that lane.”

She was never shy when controversy arose: When it surfaced that an SJPD officer moonlighting for the San Francisco 49ers may have complicated a domestic-violence investigation into one of the players — spurring reporting by this newspaper that revealed questionable ties between police and the team — she suggested the wholesale abolishment of secondary employment in the department.

She also set her sights on lower-profile issues she believed undermined the department’s professionalism, often to the agency’s chagrin, like when she railed against an internal T-shirt worn by a special weapons unit that depicted rifles and skulls, describing it as something more appropriate for a biker gang.

When Cordell was appointed by an 8-3 council vote in 2010, the office was muddled in political turmoil. The council refused to reappoint her predecessor, Barbara Attard, who openly clashed with the police chief, chafed at the limits of her oversight powers under the city charter and sought to enhance them. That, ironically, ended up being one of Cordell’s core objectives for the job.

The office was also fielding accusations that a staffer in the office had been feeding confidential information to the police union about investigations into potential officer misconduct. A formal probe did not substantiate the allegations of a mole, but a staff member was fired shortly after its completion.

Among the issues Cordell pushed most vociferously during her tenure was a policy to document all street detainments where people were made to “curb sit” on the sidewalk or street and were later let go without arrest or citation. A policy was eventually passed in 2013, with the eventual aim of analyzing the data to confirm or discredit broad claims of racial profiling.

“That’s huge. If it shows issues, this is the time to get in there and make it right,” she said. “The first step was getting the data collected.”

Cordell’s stature in civil-rights issues was tapped again when San Jose State University chose her that same year to head a panel to investigate an alleged hate crime against a black student. And last year, amid a national conversation about police and race politics in the wake of the infamous deadly shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Cordell penned a national op-ed piece on Slate.com advocating for the abolishment of criminal grand juries.

Approaching retirement, she is working on a memoir about her time as a judge, attached to consult with criminal-justice reform panels in other Bay Area cities, and considering a legal analyst position for local broadcast media. The classically trained pianist will also continue her work overseeing the African American Composer Initiative, which she started six years ago at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto.

“I’ve learned so much about San Jose, and so much about policing,” she said. “We started off with crisis. Now, we’re good.”

Contact Robert Salonga at 408-920-5002. Follow him at Twitter.com/robertsalonga.