Aurora police chief Acevedo talks crime rate, legacy of Elijah McClain in 2023 appraisal

AURORA | Summing up the past year of policing in Aurora, interim Police Chief Art Acevedo said Thursday that the city’s cops have embraced a “culture of accountability.”

“We want to hold ourselves accountable,” Acevedo said. “Responsible organizations look for opportunities (for) how can we do things differently? How can we do things better? And that’s what we are. We are a learning organization.”

Accountability took many forms in 2023.

Looking outward, Acevedo boasted that the city’s elected leaders and cops turned Aurora into an “island of accountability” for criminals through proactive enforcement backed up with the threat of mandatory jail sentences for crimes such as vehicle and retail theft.

Aurora’s motor vehicle theft rate fell by about 23.5% between 2022 and 2023, part of a 11.6% reduction in property crime overall, while violent crime declined by about 14.5%, according to the department.

Rates of property crime and violent crime both statewide and in other large cities, such as Denver, were also trailing 2022 rates approaching the end of last year, according to state and federal analyses and reports.

Turning inward, accountability looked like the police department striving to meet the expectations of the reform agreement that was crafted to crack down on excessively violent, racist policing by Aurora officers.

The department made strides, including by rewriting policies on physical force and constitutional rights, retraining officers on those policies and changing how uses of force are reviewed after the fact. Other times, the department fell short, struggling most of the year to roll out a system that would allow police to track uses of force and breezing past a deadline for anti-bias training.

For the family of Elijah McClain, whose death gave rise to the city’s reform agreement, accountability meant watching three Aurora police officers and two firefighters go on trial for criminally-negligent homicide and assault.

The prosecution was a mixed bag, resulting in convictions for the two firefighters and officer Randy Roedema. Officers Jason Rosenblatt and Nathan Woodyard were acquitted.

Woodyard was reinstated as a police officer in November. Acevedo said Woodyard remains on personal leave and would not be returned to a public-facing role if he decides to continue working for the department.

Reflecting on the trials that followed the four-year anniversary of McClain’s death, Acevedo said he believed officers would not have escalated the situation involving McClain if it occurred today.

“I believe that lives will be saved because of the changes that his death brought to our department in terms of the way we do business,” Acevedo said, specifically mentioning changes to how and when officers are taught to use physical force.

“We failed Elijah McClain as a department. We failed Mrs. McClain as a department. We failed our community as a department. But we also failed the officers who encountered him that night. We needed to do better, and, thank God, as a result of that tragedy, our men and women are doing phenomenal work.”

Acevedo led police agencies in Austin, Houston and Miami before he was chosen to serve as the Aurora Police Department’s interim chief at the end of 2022.

The move capped off a year of tumult which saw the City of Aurora fire its police chief, Vanessa Wilson, and launch a national search for her replacement, only to come up emptyhanded.

Acevedo started and ended 2023 as the city’s interim police chief — he declined to say Thursday whether he will seek permanent appointment.

Despite the lack of turnover at the top of the department, Aurora police grappled with the public over other controversies in 2023, including the rehiring of Matt Green, who threatened McClain with a police dog while McClain was restrained on the ground, and the prosecutions of now-former officers Douglas Harroun and Eduardo Landeros.

The first test of Acevedo’s leadership came in June 2023, when a Black teenager, Jor’Dell Richardson, was shot by an Aurora police officer who said Richardson fled from the scene of an armed robbery and then reached for a pellet gun resembling a firearm after he was tackled to the ground.

Acevedo initially described the pellet gun as a firearm and didn’t correct the misrepresentation for several days, leading activists to accuse him of lying to deflect criticism from the officers involved. Acevedo insists he wasn’t told about the discrepancy until the day before he acknowledged it publicly.

The officer who fired the fatal shot was later cleared by internal investigators and the office of district attorney John Kellner for his decision to use lethal force.

On Thursday, Acevedo again referred to the incident as a “tragedy” but said the department will base its actions in response to officer-involved killings on “the facts, the evidence and the law, and not on which way the wind is blowing.”

“We have to call balls and strikes. Leaders don’t come to work to keep their jobs, they come to work to do their jobs,” Acevedo said. “And that is a two way street. I don’t care what the union rep thinks. Let’s face it: if you listen to the union rep, no officer has ever done anything wrong.”

Acevedo said he selected the department’s current senior leadership based on their commitment to police work and willingness to cooperate in reforms. He added that McClain’s death reflected a failure of leadership in the department and that some of the controversy surrounding Wilson’s tenure as chief was due to “people that were undermining her.”

While the department continues to struggle with staffing, he said he takes pride in a boom in officers progressing through academy training, 30 people as of December, and insisted the department is moving “in the right direction.”

Describing Aurora’s consent decree reform agreement as an opportunity for the department to embrace learning and professional development, Acevedo voiced optimism about the department being able to exit the first phase of the agreement in the near future.

The second phase of the agreement will focus on monitoring the department’s ongoing compliance with the reforms enacted during the first phase.

Acevedo said an online portal that will allow the public to access aggregate data about the department’s enforcement activities would also become active in a matter of weeks, reflecting the consent decree’s emphasis on transparency.

Before leaving Thursday’s news conference, Acevedo expressed frustration over journalists’ scrutiny of the department, saying that “no department in Colorado has been scrutinized and maligned over and over again.” He also took a parting shot at the department’s union representatives.

“Please take time to thank the men and women that wear this badge,” Acevedo said. “They deserve support. And when they screw up as an individual, we’re going to hold them accountable. And I don’t care what the union thinks. … We’re not here to work for the union. We’re not here to work for anybody but the public and our men and women.”