San Jose police officers may be forcing blacks, Latinos and other minorities to sit on street curbs more than others after minor traffic and pedestrian stops, according to the city’s independent police auditor.

LaDoris Cordell said Thursday she wants cops to document the ethnicity or race of everyone ordered to “curb sit” and to record the specific reason for the stop. She also wants officers to wear small cameras on their uniforms to record everything that happens.

“It would be a huge step in building trust between the San Jose Police Department and the community,” she said a few minutes before posting her annual report to the City Council on the Internet.

Cordell included 30 recommendations, some she hopes will fix long-standing problems and some to address new ones, such as the “curb sitting.”

While she acknowledged that her evidence was largely anecdotal, taken from interviews with people who complained about the practice, Cordell said she worries that police officers are forcing people to sit on curbs following minor traffic and pedestrian stops, even though they pose no threat to officers.

Raj Jayadev, a member of the Coalition for Justice and Accountability, liked the idea.

“It’ll help us get the scope of the problem and move the discussion forward,” he said. “We’ll have something objective and quantitative for the city to work with.”

Police Chief Chris Moore was out of town Thursday, but department spokesman Sgt. Jason Dwyer said Moore and Cordell had already discussed some of the auditor’s recommendations and agreed in principle on gathering the curb-sitting information.

“We are in the process to trying to figure out the best way of capturing that data,” Dwyer said.

Representatives of the San Jose Police Officers Association could not be reached for comment Thursday afternoon.

Cordell is scheduled to present her report and recommendations to the City Council on April 24. The mayor and council members can adopt some or all of the recommendations, but that doesn’t mean they’ll go into effect. In the murky politics between City Hall and police headquarters, the chief enjoys a lot of power and the union representing officers has a lot influence.

Cordell’s report also revisits the long-running dispute over the police department’s internal investigations of officers accused of brutality and other misconduct. Last year, she blasted the department’s Internal Affairs office for taking too long to investigate complaints against officers and not leaving her team enough time to review or appeal them. In some cases, officers got off on technicalities when their cases weren’t resolved before the required time limit.

In San Jose’s version of police watchdogging, the police department investigates complaints against its officers, but Cordell’s office has the right to review the findings and appeal them.

This year, Cordell decided not to “whine and complain” about the slowness problem. She thinks many complaints are being rejected by commanders, who have the ability to review and reject the Internal Affairs reports on officers they supervise.

In 2011, she reports, the division upheld only one of 72 allegations of unnecessary force against officers, more or less the same rate as the year before. The majority were exonerated.

The auditor recommends cutting the police supervisors out of the process and allowing the Internal Affairs commander to send his findings directly to the chief of police.

In her presentation to the council, Cordell may add a more controversial remedy: handing Internal Affairs over to retired lawyers, judges and paralegals.

“You don’t need a gun to be in Internal Affairs,” she said.

Part of the problem, she said, is that patrol officers assigned to Internal Affairs take months to train in legal investigations and then often leave after only two years. However, a police commander would supervise civilian investigators and the chief would still have the final say. Cordell said she expects a lot of “push-back” from the police rank and file, so she may propose a pilot program starting with two civilian experts.

Dwyer said the chief would be open to a civilian expert “supplementing but not necessarily replacing” officers in the unit.

For the first time, Cordell said, more civilians are coming to her office to file complaints against police officers than are going to police headquarters, which also accepts complaints. By her count, community outreach improved dramatically. She and her assistants visited more places in 2011 and got their message to about 13,300 people, an increase of 59 percent from 2010.

Contact Joe Rodriguez at 408-920-5767.