AURORA | A loud chorus of protesters chanting “shame on you” and “vote them out” followed Aurora City Council’s ratification on Monday of the city’s new police chief.
Eight council members voted to approve former Los Angeles Police Commander Todd Chamberlain for the top job at Aurora’s beleaguered police department.
Council members Rubin Medina and Crystal Murillo opposed his appointment, siding with the protesters that the city should have invited community input about a police chief hire before announcing Chamberlain’s appointment late last week as a done deal.
“I agree, we did not have a community process,” said Murillo, who committed to working with Chamberlain even though she opposed his hiring.
Among critics of the city’s selection process were many of the same police reform activists who have been appearing at council meetings since June 24 to renounce the May 23 shooting of Kilyn Lewis, an unarmed Black man shot by Aurora SWAT Officer Michael Dieck. They have spent months urging council members, unsuccessfully, to force law enforcement to speed up their investigation, fire Dieck — who is on paid leave during the probe — and criminally charge him for Lewis’ killing.
The investigation is in the hands of an external unit comprising the district attorney for Arapahoe County and police agencies outside of Aurora.
Although protesters repeated those demands on Monday, many also signed up to decry the council for leaving the public out of the process of selecting the seventh head of the department in five years.
Anna Chambers, an Aurora resident who claims a history of harassment by city police, called the city’s hiring of Chamberlain without public input “an insult to Aurora citizens”
“The betrayal and distrust is real,” she said.
Aaron Futrell criticized Chamberlain for his comment at a news conference last week that “Use of forces are still going to happen” under his watch, as if they are an inevitability. The difference under his tenure as chief, he added, will be that “the entire department [will] understand what happened” and learn “to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
“It doesn’t have to happen,” Futrell told the council, noting that “it’s really sad” that the most public input the council invited about Chamberlain came in the minutes before they were set to formalize his appointment.
Futrell noted Chamberlain’s absence from Monday’s meeting.
“Where is he tonight…?” he asked. “If this man can’t show up tonight, how can he show up for community in the future?”
City spokesman Ryan Luby later told the Sentinel that Chamberlain “wasn’t expected” at Monday’s meeting, and he is home to Los Angeles. The new chief is set to be sworn in on Sept. 9 for a job that pays $250,000 a year plus benefits, up to nine months of housing costs and gives him a city vehicle for business and personal use.
Activist MiDian Shofner took umbrage with City Manager Jason Batchelor’s insistence last week on not making public the names of finalists for the chief’s job because, Batchelor said, it could place their current job in jeopardy.”
“You didn’t have a problem getting candidates in the pool because of the public knowing what they’re doing. You had a problem because this is the Aurora Police Department,” Shofner said, referring to the force’s long, much publicized pattern of excessive force, racial profiling, secrecy and refusal to weed out many of its rogue officers.
A few speakers berated the council for spending more time bickering about a contract for digital billboards than discussing how Chamberlain might lead the 700-person police force.
The resolution to negotiate with Lamar Advertising on a non-competitive contract to build and operate so-called “monument signs” in various spots throughout the city sparked heated debate on Monday. Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky defended her “months of work” trying to secure a non-competitive contract for the company with which Mayor Mike Coffman was also critical of.
“This really needs to follow a competitive bid process,” Coffman said.
“How can we do this for just one company?” added Councilmember Francoise Bergan, who noted she had never in nine years on the council seen the city skirt its contracting policies so blatantly.
An executive with OutFront Media, one of Lamar’s competitors, complained to council members outside of Jurinsky that his company had been told the city would be putting the digital billboard contract up for competitive bid and felt “misled” to learn it hadn’t.
The council nevertheless approved the resolution 6-4, with Council Members Bergan, Medina, Murillo and Alison Coombs casting no-votes, and with Coffman, as mayor, not voting.
While I agree that Police EVERYWHERE are not being policed, themselves, I’m not sure what public input was going to accomplish. Remember the testing of Rangers and officers we’ve seen on TV, making split-second decisions on who “popped up” on a course? Are our actual officers so inept, fearing everyone, that they protect themselves without thinking? When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, as the expression goes. I fault training, which seems practically non-existent. Just MAYBE this guy values it, too?
The Aurora Sentinel, members of the Aurora City Council, and voters in the City of Aurora need to keep open eyes for any side deals that Councilwoman Jurinsky may have with Lamar Advertising. Jurinsky’s past actions indicate that she has a transactional tendency — what does she expect as a return on her advocacy of a no-bid contract?
Why? She gets away with every infraction or, she sues.
3 more years of this
Community involvement does not and did not need to be involved when searching for a new Police Chief. City Manager and his team did a great job in finding the best qualified candidate. Shame on the two council members who voted not to approve him. They represent their constituents and they should be expected to to be good with this hire and not be so negative . Vote out the City Manager? Are you kidding? Jason is doing an awesome job!! Recall the two idiot council members who just aren’t very educated and who are always stirring the pot. Welcome Chief Chamberlain to Aurora. Tall task ahead of you but, with your experience you’ll do great things here in Aurora.
Jurinsky one of them????
Agreed. There have been 7 Chiefs in five years and there has been community involvement and the job just kept churning. Community involvement obviously does not guarantee a thing in the actual performance of the Chief. Time to move on .
Congratulations to our new Chief of Police. Community involvement does not and did not need to be involved when searching for a new Police Chief. City Manager and his team did a great job in finding the best qualified candidate. Shame on the two council members who voted not to approve him. They represent their constituents and they should be expected to to be good with this hire and not be so negative . Vote out the City Manager? Are you kidding? Jason is doing an awesome job!! Recall the two idiot council members who just aren’t very educated and who are always stirring the pot. Welcome Chief Chamberlain to Aurora. Tall task ahead of you but, with your experience you’ll do great things here in Aurora.
By hiring Chamberlain the way they did, the city set him up to fail. By angering the public, they put his, and every APD officer’s, safety at risk. If the Council wants to disregard its constituents, that’s one thing. But they should care about what this does for police relations in the city with the worst history of police distrust in the state and one of the worst in the country. I don’t know why this guy would want to step into a hostile community that already dislikes the police. I predict that Aurora will be looking for another new chief in 6 months when Chamberlain throws in the towel and decides LA isn’t so bad, after all. I hope they get it right THEN because this is not how you do this if you want to bring peace.
So councilwoman Jurinsky finally delivers the goods to Lamar advertising after two years. I hope they give her a real nice campaign donation for her having sold out the City. She has let the billboard industry’s camel’s nose inside the City tent and she subverted the City’s Purchasing Code to do so. Expect a proliferation of visual clutter in the coming years, clutter which will make Aurora look even more low-rent than it is.
No community involvement in the hiring of a police chief for a very troubled department? No competitive bids for a contract? Sounds like the same old stuff out of our MAGA council members. More “my way or the highway” out of Jurinsky!
Wow Michael! COOL!
First Aurora Water hands out a $5 million pre-paid change order to its favored contractor — who was allegedly struggling moneywise. Now city council simply tosses out the city’s procurement rules all together?
November 2025 can’t arrive soon enough.
Non of them are up for reelection
Expect complaints and lawsuits stemming from this no-bid contract award. Other Contractors will be very unhappy Aurora violated its Purchasing Code in favor of this one vendor. The vendors denied this opportunity will start with a flurry of open records requests to find out how this happened and will want to know why they were not provided an opportunity to bid on the contract. Given Aurora’s recent history with obfuscation on producing records expect lawsuits galore. Expect other billboard companies to be angry that the City has violated its own Sign Code to provide this unfair advantage to this one vendor. EEExpect thhe Citty Attorney to have to rework the entirety of thhee CCity Sign Code tto make provision for this action, a time consuming and ccostly process. Other advertising vendors will ask, rightfully, why they cannot negotiate with private property owners to place competing signs. What is the rationale for allowing the City an economic advantage unavailable to private business. The lawsuits and wrangling will be impressive and costly and eventually the City will be a clutter of billboard advertising, degrading the visual landscape for all.
Expect the citizen advocacy groups and the police unions to question the hiring process for the new Chief. He is being imposed upon them rather than initially supported and aproved by them. That is a recipe for failure.
What we saw at this last Monday council meeting looks as some preoccupation on from city hall for creating as much obfuscation as necessary when questionable issues arise. Several issues came up that showed us this council is either complicit to allow questionable policy issues to come so far as they were easily recognized in public, as the critics bit-back. The city tells us something, we expect spoken in good faith, but we are learning this is not quite all true. Aurora says they want public input on a new APD chief -then work hard to make excuses why not. Public input – not today folks. Was that a political calculation decision, who knows. Some or all of the council sure did! The city manager had to fade the heat on that one. A five -year single source no bid advertising company pilot program with a private vendor, and no one knows what’s going on. Somebody, knows what’s going on.
We are told about the accomplishments made at the Nome and Colfax Street apartment. We are told the eviction and state of affairs its under control, no worries, it’s in good hands, run now by the city. In the meantime, Robbie Dejong at this council meeting says otherwise. Robbie, says she was shocked at what a disaster area the whole neighborhood has turned into. The apartment failure is the tip of the iceberg, as the city oversees codes as these other emerging apartment catastrophes continue. Who is paying for these hotel rooms for all these evicted people. The city will tell us not the taxpayer, well we will see, as this sounds like more city hall expediency.
Justina Minka, a local lawyer also spoke at the same council meeting. She is asking council “what is going on in this city”. Her observation of the squalor of general third world appearance is everywhere akin to Dejong’s. But as a lawyer her view did include the municipal courts, and what a sham they have turned those into for any real law implementation. The cites response, always the same, all is well.
So I looked up the backup materials for the Council meeting. It seems these electronic billboards which were contracted for in violation of Aurora’s Purchasing Code and which will violate the terms of Aurora’s Unified Development Ordinance Sign Code will be placed at or near some of Aurora’s highest accident occurance intersections. Nothing like adding to the distractions in already dangerous intersections. And whynis this being done? Will Aurora suppliment its budget by 1% or to the tune of 5 million dollars per year? Nope. The City will reap less than 1% of 1% of their total budget in added revenue. Seems too small a price to recieve for selling out the City Code to an advertiser just because that advertiser has wooed a Council Member.