Aurora police and fire embark on next phase of reform agreement: ‘Significant progress’

AURORA | It’s the end of the beginning of Aurora’s promised overhaul of its public safety agencies, and despite ongoing challenges quantifying and demonstrating progress to skeptical members of the public, officials say the city is ready for the next step — a three-year period of observation that will give Aurora the chance to prove its commitment to lasting reform.

“We’re continuing to move in the right direction,” said Chris Juul, chief of the Aurora Police Department’s Professional Standards and Training Division. “It’s been very positive overall for the organization. It’s been received very, very well. And I would also say that the improvements that we’ve made with clarification in policy have been very helpful for folks.”

In February 2022, the clock officially started on the five-year agreement, known as a “consent decree,” between the City of Aurora and the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.

That time period reflects the two years Aurora was given to come into compliance with the decree, specifically the sections mandating certain types of training for first responders, followed by at least three years of independent oversight to ensure the decree has a lasting impact.

Jeff Schlanger — founder and president of IntegrAssure, the Florida-based risk management firm paid to supervise Aurora’s work on the decree — said April 17 that his company has started ramping up the work that will distinguish the second phase of the decree from the first.

“The department is on a good trajectory,” Schlanger said. “But there’s a long way to go.”

The Aurora Police Department, Aurora Fire Rescue and the Aurora Civil Service Commission have enacted dozens of reforms since 2022, including changes to policies, data systems and training designed in large part to prevent a repeat of the events that led up to the 2019 death of Elijah McClain at the hands of police and firefighters.

The reforms were also designed to engender public trust in the city’s police officers and firefighters in the wake of McClain’s death as well as a string of high-profile scandals at APD.

In its latest report on the city’s progress, released April 15, IntegrAssure again confirmed that Aurora police have changed how incidents involving force are reviewed after the fact, retrained cops on using force and clarified rules and training on when they can stop, search and arrest members of the public, among numerous other changes.

Aurora Fire Rescue policies concerning the use of sedatives such as ketamine — which a forensic pathologist said was the immediate cause of McClain’s death, after he was injected with an overdose of the drug by Aurora Fire Rescue paramedics — have also been rewritten.

Still pending are the rollout of an overdue anti-bias training for Aurora police officers and mandates requiring that the police department maintain data on police encounters in such a way that it can be readily accessed and analyzed in aggregate.

The report also notes that data about individual officers’ history of using force isn’t isn’t readily available for the department’s Force Review Board to consider as part of the evaluation of particular incidents, which the authors of the report said is crucial for determining how to treat an officer found to have used force inappropriately.

Despite these limitations, Schlanger said his firm has a robust plan for analyzing what effects the decree is having on policing in Aurora, to include analyzing body-worn camera footage from all encounters where Aurora police have used force on members of the public that would not otherwise be scrutinized by the board.

“I think the qualitative analysis that we’re doing is really the (most) significant aspect of what we will be doing for the next three years,” he said. “And that’s looking at individual instances of police interaction with the public and essentially judging those and determining whether those comport with the policies and the training that have been reformed.”

Even officials optimistic about Aurora exiting the three-year monitorship in a timely way and in better shape than when the decree commenced have acknowledged the process hasn’t been easy.

Aurora has been without a permanent police chief for more than two years, ever since the firing of Vanessa Wilson in what city management has said was a response to Wilson’s failure to effectively manage the department and rally Aurora’s demoralized officer force.

Wilson sued the city last month for its decision, saying she was retaliated against for her efforts to hold officers accountable for the same excessively violent and insensitive behavior the consent decree was designed to curb.

Since Wilson’s firing, the department has served under a succession of interim leaders, including former chief Dan Oates; ex-Austin, Houston and Miami chief Art Acevedo; and, most recently, Acevedo’s deputy chief, Heather Morris.

On April 22, City Manager Jason Batchelor would not provide an update on the city’s ongoing quest to lock in a permanent chief beyond saying a decision would be made “in the next several months.”

Besides instability at the top of the department, controversies such as the decision to rehire an officer who threatened to have a police dog bite McClain while the latter was being restrained on the ground and the release of inaccurate information following the 2023 shooting of Jor’Dell Richardson, 14, have led activists to question how serious the city and other parties to the reform process are about improving relations between police and community members.

When asked to weigh in on Aurora’s progress, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser had little to say about the extent to which the police department has succeeded at rebuilding trust.

“Ultimately, the residents of Aurora must have confidence in the process, and that will require meaningful community engagement moving forward,” Weiser said in a statement. “Aurora has put effort into complying with their obligations under the consent decree. The past two years have focused on updating policies and training on those policies. Implementing those policies successfully will be critical for creating lasting change in policing and the culture at the Aurora Police Department.”

Some members of a civilian oversight group assembled by IntegrAssure to observe the process told the Sentinel they question the firm’s own commitment to holding the police department accountable.

Shortly after the publication of the April 15 report, Schlanger informed members of the Community Advisory Council in an email that their tenures were being terminated and that they needed to reapply if they wanted to continue to serve.

“We were supposed to be that advisory group, and it became more of an advocate for the community,” said Thomas Mayes, an Aurora pastor and one of the members of the council.

“(IntegrAssure) kind of fell in line with the police department with the refusal to face up to the hard questions. As long as you played softball with them, they were good. When we started really playing hardball, really asking the hard questions, that’s when the friction came.”

Schlanger said the reconstitution of the council is not meant to prevent meaningful oversight and that the firm hopes it will lead to the group evolving to include a greater diversity of viewpoints.

He also said some members of the council had “been more active than others” and that “the ability to collaborate with fellow council members is an imperative.”

“We have worked extremely well with the Community Advisory Council,” he said. “I just want to make sure that people who didn’t get a chance have an opportunity to at least reapply with the goal of getting the broadest perspectives but also expanding the membership by a few.”

The path here, and the road ahead 

In its April 15 report — covering Aug. 16, 2023 to Feb. 15, 2024 — IntegrAssure recaps the progress made so far toward fulfilling the decree as well as how it will undertake the second stage that represents the majority of the duration of the decree.

The decree is one part of the legacy of McClain’s death, which fueled local anti-police brutality demonstrations and spurred an investigation by Weiser’s office that found Aurora officers had engaged in a pattern of racially-biased policing.

The decree mandates that Aurora police introduce new policies and training addressing racial bias, uses of force and how and when to conduct different types of encounters with members of the public, emphasizing the importance of de-escalation and community relations.

Other parts of the decree require police to do a better job of documenting encounters. The decree also calls for new mechanisms to keep track of when officers or groups of officers rack up complaints, uses of force and lawsuits.

According to the report, APD has so far complied with about half of the mandates in the decree that concern the agency specifically. Juul and Schlanger said the number of completed mandates has grown in recent weeks. Most of the incomplete mandates reflected the pending anti-bias training and the department’s ongoing data woes.

The city’s fire service was also expected to reconsider how it uses sedative drugs in the field. Aurora Fire Rescue phased out ketamine prior to the start of the decree and has since re-established its medical branch to encourage oversight of paramedic work and introduced a review process that follows all uses of sedatives by paramedics.

The agency also expanded community outreach, updated rules clarifying the respective roles of agencies at emergency scenes and rolled out new dispatch protocols with Aurora911 so firefighters are able to focus more on patient care.

Aurora Fire Rescue is reportedly in compliance with all of the mandates concerning the use of sedatives and has complied or is close to complying with the remaining reforms expected of the agency.

In an email Tuesday, fire chief Alec Oughton also highlighted voluntary steps AFR has taken to better itself, such as de-escalation training for paramedics, which he said is “rarely, if ever, taught in the fire service.”

“The changes that the consent decree have brought about for Aurora Fire Rescue have been welcomed, positive and transformative,” Oughton wrote.

“I would say that (IntegrAssure) is an accountability partner for AFR. They created a feasible and achievable roadmap, and they are continually checking in on our progress, providing candid feedback and recognizing improvements that have been made.”

Having Aurora police and firefighters play a greater part compared to the Civil Service Commission in recruiting and hiring first responders was intended to accelerate the hiring process and allow for more engagement with prospective candidates. Other changes to recruitment and hiring were meant to attract a more diverse pool of candidates and ensure police and firefighters are more representative of the community as a whole.

Commissioners have warned about the potential impacts of infringing on the function of the group as it has historically been interpreted in light of the city charter and challenged unilateral decisions that have limited the commission’s role.

However, police officials have credited the long list of changes and new investments in recruiting and hiring coinciding with the decree for a rebound in academy numbers, including a student body whose demographics more closely resemble those of the city.

The April 15 report notes that IntegrAssure plans to publish a study in the next two months of recent recruit classes, their demographics and how successful they were at completing the department’s police academy.

When Aurora enters and exits the second phase of the decree will depend on when the city reaches three “training completion milestones” defined in the decree as the point when Aurora finishes training the relevant personnel on each of the topics of using force, documenting stops and confronting racial bias.

Once at least three years have passed from the date when the city reached a given milestone, with IntegrAssure’s assent, Aurora may ask a district court judge to terminate the monitorship of the reforms associated with that particular milestone.

IntegrAssure’s oversight of the parts of the decree that aren’t associated with a particular milestone must continue for at least three years “after completion of the last substantial step required by that section” before those parts can be terminated individually.

Aurora may also ask the court to end the decree in its entirety no sooner than three years after the last milestone is met and not before substantially complying with all of the mandates therein.

Schlanger said the relationship between the partial and full termination sections of the decree is open to some interpretation but that the monitorship would not necessarily need to continue for three years after the point in time when APD is found to be in compliance with the parts of the decree pertaining to data.

As of April 17, Schlanger said the only training that current Aurora officers have yet to complete was the department’s anti-bias training, for which the decree set a deadline of Feb. 14.

Juul said the department hopes to finish rolling out the training by the end of April, with make-up training for officers who were on leave or otherwise absent scheduled for May.

Police officials and Schlanger have said the delay was the result of APD turning down a training offered by the federal Center for Naval Analyses to instead tailor a program specifically for Aurora officers that incorporated more scenario-based learning, which the department began offering in March.

“We weren’t willing to take the out-of-the-box training, which we could have done, and we could have met the goal and hit a checkmark, but that wasn’t going to be good enough,” Juul said. “So we spent the extra time to craft something that we felt would resonate with our folks and meet what those expectations of the consent decree are.”

Apart from catching up on training, the expectation that data on individual officers’ past uses of force be made readily available to investigators continues to challenge the department, according to the April 15 report.

Obstacles to analyzing the aggregate data quantifying encounters between Aurora’s entire sworn workforce and the public have also persisted several months after IntegrAssure first called the situation “extremely concerning” and Schlanger promised it would be “addressed appropriately.”

Schlanger and Juul said that, while data about uses of force and stops is now accessible, more involved analyses of the data in aggregate, such as looking at whether force is being used more often against certain races of people during similar types of encounters with police, isn’t being done automatically in real time. Instead, to obtain these insights, Schlanger said analysts must crunch the numbers using external tools.

The monitor and city have blamed a technology vendor hired to implement new data systems, Benchmark Analytics, which local officials have said has been unable to deliver on a variety of promises made in its contract. A company representative did not immediately respond to an invitation to weigh in on this characterization of Benchmark’s work.

“One of the main reasons we went with the vendor was that they were also selected by the state to provide the same data system,” Batchelor said.

“We thought, ‘Well, that’ll be good. Then we’ll be on the same system. That will ease our reporting of data up to the state.’ And that has not been the case.”

While Juul said the department has a “very good working relationship” with Benchmark, he also said the department is following through on the monitor’s suggestion in October that police explore contracting with another vendor and that Aurora will decide whether it wants to formally request bids for some of the services promised by Benchmark in the next three to five weeks.

Juul said APD is now shooting for July 1 to come into compliance with the requirements of the decree pertaining to data.

And despite the difficulty producing statistics that quantify whether and how certain patterns of enforcement are changing, officials said other kinds of feedback and trends revealed by the data are also guiding the consent decree process.

“Aurora is going well above and beyond, and I would venture to say is capturing as much if not more than the majority of agencies, if not all agencies in the state,” Batchelor said. “We just need to make sure that we’ve got a system that allows us to leverage that data collection much more efficiently.”

The story in, many, numbers

The department took one proactive step toward making more data available to the public in February when it launched its online “transparency portal,” making regularly-updated data about crime, officers’ uses of force and agency demographics available to the public for the first time without a records request.

The portal was not an explicit requirement of the decree, and parties to the reform process have held the effort up as an example of APD is acting of its own volition to earn residents’ trust.

“This was an action that went above and beyond the requirements of the consent decree,” Mayor Mike Coffman wrote in an email. “All in all, APD has been tasked with a mammoth responsibility under the consent decree, and they have made significant progress in a short amount of time.”

At the time of its launch, reform activists expressed mixed feelings about the portal, saying they appreciated APD making enforcement data available to the public but felt like the launch was a missed opportunity to publish information about the handling of complaints and internal investigations.

The department stressed that the portal would expand to include more datasets and become more robust over time, as feedback from the public informed what was published on the website.

IntegrAssure’s April 15 report mentions data about racial disparities in enforcement and the outcomes of encounters with police and investigations into complaints and uses of force as information to be included in future updates. The report says the design of the portal will continue to be updated “throughout 2024.”

Persuading Aurora residents that the city’s police department is trustworthy is a major focus of the decree. In mid-2022, a survey of residents commissioned by IntegrAssure found that just 34% of all respondents, including 26% of Black residents, said APD was doing good or excellent work. Schlanger said his firm plans to repeat the survey later this year.

Among the city’s elected leaders, opinions about the department’s progress rebuilding trust since the decree took effect are also mixed. Coffman wrote that he was “incredibly proud” of APD’s performance under the decree and that Aurora Fire Rescue and the Civil Service Commissions had likewise made “great strides.”

“I meet with Aurora residents, community organizations and businesses on a near-daily basis. I find that the vast majority of them have continuously supported and trusted APD while they have simultaneously understood the need for public safety changes,” the mayor said.

“I recognize that there are some in the community that continue to take issue with aspects of the department, but from my interactions with so many, they do not speak for the whole city.”

Councilmember Alison Coombs said in an email that she believed the department’s recent scrutiny of uses of force and commitment to learning from situations where officers could have done better has enhanced its credibility, along with outreach work done by police. She also highlighted APD’s success in recruiting new officers.

However, she said she continues to hear from community members who do not trust the police and are concerned about patterns of bias.

“Many people still do not believe that our officers are focused on protecting all people equally,” she wrote. “I do think better data and the ability to use that data to (learn) about what’s really happening in the department can play an important role in building that trust. The continued presence of officers in the community understanding the needs of the diverse groups they serve will also be a benefit.”

Coombs said improvements to the way in which data about stops, including who police tend to stop, is collected and reported would help quantify the city’s ability to accomplish the goals in the decree, and suggested it could be incorporated into the transparency portal.

Heather Morris — who replaced Art Acevedo as interim chief earlier this year after she was invited to serve as deputy chief in 2023 — said APD’s outreach to young people at community events and through schools has been particularly impactful in terms of building trust.

As one example, she mentioned how officers plan to join student volunteers from Hinkley High School for an upcoming cleanup of the High Line Canal Trail. She also said the department has been working to inform Aurora’s immigrant community about the process of reporting crimes and how coming forward as a crime victim doesn’t mean a person will face immigration consequences.

“We’re always looking for opportunities to meet with any of them, because this is a really diverse community,” she said. “There’s just so many different areas like that where we’re partnering and collaborating with the community on different things.”

Schlanger said the next step of implementing the consent decree is meant to ensure the city’s progress so far toward building trust and improving operations across the board continues.

According to the April 15 report, the multipronged monitoring effort will include reviewing police encounters that meet one of several criteria; focused, rotating evaluations of individual police districts and special units; evaluating enforcement data, especially as more data becomes available; and meeting at least twice a month with police leaders.

IntegrAssure’s “360-degree” analysis of certain police encounters will involve screening body-worn camera footage, looking over reports prepared by officers and evaluating how instances of poor performance are handled by supervisors and the department as a whole.

The 360-degree review philosophy will be applied, at least in the beginning, to all incidents leading to:

• A complaint or lawsuit.
• The use of a chemical sedative.
• A police officer chasing a member of the public.
• An arrest made for obstruction, resisting arrest, failure to obey a lawful order or trespassing where prosecutors later declined to bring charges or the case was dismissed.
• A use of force such as pulling someone to ground or placing them in a restraint other than handcuffs, which falls into the first “tier” of force defined by the department (uses of higher-tier force, which are more likely to cause injury or death, are already evaluated by the department’s internal Force Review Board, which IntegrAssure also observes).

Schlanger said the process will be used to alert the department to opportunities for addressing problems with individual officers as well as any systemic shortcomings.

He described a hypothetical scenario in which an officer is found to have acted in an unsafe way by pointing his or her firearm in the direction of another officer, which could result in the officer being given additional training.

“But it may be that we find this happening often enough that we recommend training for the entire department. Or it may be that a policy doesn’t adequately address something that we are seeing. So there can be systemic recommendations at the same time that there can be officer-specific recommendations,” Schlanger said.

Twice-monthly meetings will provide a regular forum for the firm to raise concerns, though Schlanger said they wouldn’t wait for a meeting to raise a time-sensitive issue.

The same criteria will be applied when the monitor focuses on a particular district or unit — additionally, the monitor will review when and how citations were issued by officers in those units as well as other contacts with the public, especially homeless people and those experiencing mental health problems.

Among other compliance checks, those reviews will also involve comparing dispatch logs to available body-worn camera footage to determine whether an officer may not have turned on their camera when required.

Schlanger said the monitor will further scrutinize enforcement data such as contact data, pursuits and complaints — analysis of the former two categories of data will include looking for demographic disparities in a manner similar to the National Policing Institute, which last year prepared a report on law enforcement data generated by the Aurora Police Department.

Over the next two to three months, Schlanger also hopes to stand up another civilian initiative in addition to the Community Advisory Council called Community-Assisted Monitoring of Police, or CAMP. While details of the program were sparse, Schlanger said participants would be a part of ensuring APD is operating in a transparent, accountable way.

As for the community council, Schlanger said he believed that, while an all-new group would have to confront a “learning curve” of getting up to speed on the work done so far, he believed most of the council would reapply.

Two of the group’s three co-chairs, local pastor Reid Hettich and Aurora NAACP president Omar Montgomery, said they do not plan to continue on as part of the new group.

The two said Schlanger contacted them shortly before the rest of the council to talk about the future of the council, and Schlanger ultimately decided to ask all members to reapply for their seats. 

While neither said they doubted the monitor’s stated reasons for ending the tenures of the council’s co-chairs and nine members, they were emphatic that the council as it existed was successful and had laid the foundation for future work.

“There’s some mixed emotions, and even in talking to other community members, the emotions and reactions kind of run the gamut,” Hettich said.

“I think we all realize that it is the monitor’s job, and responsibility, and authority to reshuffle if he thinks something better can be accomplished. And I don’t think there’s any sense that somehow we’re going to try to fight it and change it.”

Other council members said they believed Schlanger was unhappy about the group pushing for details about how the police department specifically was being held accountable instead of simply serving as a conduit between the community and participants in the reform process.

“We didn’t work for them. And that’s one thing I could not get them to understand: the word ‘community’ in the title of who we were,” pastor Thomas Mayes said.

Maisha Fields, daughter of state Sen. Rhonda Fields and another member of the council, also accused Schlanger of expecting a “rubber stamp” from the council rather than another layer of input into the reform process and specifically reforms at APD.

“He has not been holding their feet to the fire,” Maisha Fields said. “I think Jeff is used to working with less opinionated individuals.”

Fields and Mayes said they sensed friction was developing between Schlanger and the council but that Schlanger’s notice via email that the group would be expected to reapply still came as a surprise. Mayes said he plans to reapply, even if the outcome is being formally rejected for reappointment.

All insisted the group had been able to work together and function as a team. Becky Hogan, another member, said she also believed IntegrAssure’s vision for the council was limited to providing feedback on specific metrics of performance, although she characterized this as a difference of opinion rather than proof of any ill-intent on the part of Schlanger.

Hogan said she viewed serving on the council as a way to influence change within the framework of the reform process.

“For me, I’m comfortable working in an advisory capacity, because I truly believe change comes from the inside out,” she said, though she added she wanted more clarity on the role of the reconstituted council before deciding whether to apply again.

Schlanger said members of the public interested in serving on the council can access applications through the firm’s website — auroramonitor.org — starting the week of April 29. He said applications will be accepted for two weeks once they’re made available and that the selection process is expected to take an additional week.

In response to questions about how the city has fallen short of some of the timelines and goals described in the decree, officials directly involved in the reform process also mentioned that embracing the need continuous improvement and making that a part of the culture of Aurora’s public safety agencies is part of living up to the city’s commitment to reform.

“We’re taking that kind of continued introspective look to make sure that we’re continually improving the (police) department’s operations and procedures, and making sure we’re never satisfied with the progress we’ve made,” Batchelor said.

“I think we’ve made significant progress. But that’s the challenge now, is to make sure that we position ourselves to continue to build on the good work we’ve done.”