CHIEF DESIGN: It takes a conflicted village to build Aurora’s next police chief

AURORA | One word keeps coming up since Aurora named former Los Angeles Police commander Todd Chamberlain its new police chief: stability.

Although there may be little else they all agree on, city officials, social justice advocates and police officers told the Sentinel this past week that what they most want from the new head of Aurora’s beleaguered police force is some staying power.

Chamberlain will be the department’s seventh chief in five years. 

“Most importantly, we need a solid foundation of leadership, which we haven’t had in a minimum of 28 months. Consistency, continuity have been lacking,” said Marc Sears, a sergeant in the Aurora Police Department and president of the Fraternal Order of Police, one of two Aurora police unions. 

Chamberlain, 61, comes on confident. He insists he’s “here to stay” and says the challenges APD faces are nothing he hasn’t already encountered in his 34 years in the LAPD. 

Still, once he swears in Sept. 9, he will face the same conflicting pressures that torpedoed most of Aurora’s six previous chiefs and interim chiefs.

Chamberlain will be expected to meet the whims of an often divided and demanding council that has sent mixed messages about making meaningful changes in Aurora’s controversy-plagued police force. The majority of its members have defended APD in its long string of use-of-force cases and pushed against reform efforts required under a state order and championed by a large part of the Aurora community.

That state order, called a consent decree, was imposed in 2021 after an investigation by the Colorado attorney general into APD’s record. It found “patterns and practices” of excessive use of force, especially against people of color. The decree requires APD to mend its ways by 2027.

Concerned about ongoing turnover, Attorney General Phil Weiser last week called on Aurora to establish an independent office monitoring the police department’s adherence to reforms after the consent decree expires.

“A permanent structure for independent review of the police department would help ensure that reform, accountability, and transparency continue, and that the city is responsive to community concerns,” Weiser said.

Such a structure would have to be put in place by the city council, which is unlikely, given the group’s efforts to stall a previous nascent effort set out by a previous city manager, but never funded.

As Sears tells it, Chamberlain is a cop’s cop, “very disciplined, very militaristic kind of individual.”

“He’s fit, takes care of himself, he’s very proud, a very proud man,” he said. “That goes a long way, and I believe him when he says he has compassion for law enforcement.”

Still, the union president says he worries about “city council staying in their lane” when it comes to the new chief. Although the city charter specifically states that council members do not have the ability nor authority to direct police department operations, Sears says “they get overzealous sometimes” by trying to push policies and programs the force doesn’t have resources for.

As of this week, the department had 62 to 100 vacancies for officers, depending whether you count officers in its academy. Five of its officers are currently on paid administrative leave and under investigation.

“I need to have a chief that is going to push back on council sometimes and recognize that certain ideas and ordinances and resolutions they have are just not feasible at this time,” Sears said. “They mean well, and they want the best. But the reality of how we attack situations, they have no idea about.” 

In the community, Chamberlain faces skepticism among police reform and civil rights advocates because city officials announced his appointment on Aug. 21 without a public vetting process. Some have questioned why he would want a job in a city without first meeting with residents beyond just elected officials and police. Some also have been critical of a comment he made at a news conference last week that “Use of forces are still going to happen” under his leadership.

“A lot of people don’t want that, but there’s a lot of times that that has to happen… and I’m sorry, but that’s an unfortunate reality…in law enforcement,” he said.

Aurora resident Aaron Futrell told council members Monday that uses of force do not need to be inevitable. He also criticized Chamberlain for not attending the public meeting during which the council voted 8-2 to ratify his appointment to the $250,000 a year job. Members Rubin Medina and Crystal Murillo cast the dissenting votes. 

“Where is he tonight…?” Futrell asked about Chamberlain, whom a city spokesman said wasn’t expected at the meeting because he was home in Los Angeles and hasn’t moved here yet. “If this man can’t show up tonight, how can he show up for community in the future?”

Qusair Mohamedbhai, a Denver civil rights lawyer who has represented a number of APD officers’ excessive use-of-force victims, agrees that Chamberlain is “starting off with a big deficit.”

“Everything is about community engagement and buy-in, and when you have a police chief who was selected with little to no engagement, I think that chief will spend a lot of time trying to make up for it. We’ll have a chief who can’t hit the ground running on day one, but will be met with a lot of suspicion.”

At every city council meeting since June 24, social justice activists have renounced the May 23 shooting of Kilyn Lewis, an unarmed Black man shot by Aurora SWAT Officer Michael Dieck during his arrest on May 23. Lewis, 37, died two days later from his wounds.

Meeting after meeting, members of Lewis’s family and empathetic protesters have lined up to demand council members 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 out of the hands of the city council and even the police department. Officer involved shooting investigations are handled by outside Critical Incident Response Team, in this case comprising 18th Judicial District prosecutors and the Arapahoe County Sheriff Department.  

The council, visibly uncomfortable with some of the remarks aimed at its members, for more than a month opted to meet beyond closed doors and televise part of its meetings to avoid the protesters’ name-calling and chanting “shame on you” and “vote them out.”

On Aug. 12, an activist asked council members to stand if they think Lewis should still be alive. Most of them did. At the next council meeting on Aug. 26, the same activist made the same request. Only three council members stood. Several in the crowd of protesters saw the remaining members’ unwillingness to stand again as proof that they don’t or won’t see excessive use-of-force as an ongoing problem that deserves their sustained attention.

Chamberlain worked for the LAPD from 1984 through 2018, when he retired as a commander who oversaw about 1,800 people across six divisions in that department.  Critics in Aurora point out that his tenure in LAPD coincided with similar accusations against that department involving excessive force cases, racial profiling controversies and a laundry list of police scandals.  Los Angeles was under a similar consent decree for more than a decade, ending in 2013. 

After retiring from LAPD, Chamberlain worked as Chief of Police for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LASPD) and, more recently, as a public-safety consultant and a lecturer at California State University Los Angeles.

When speaking to reporters last week, he emphasized that he has worked in diverse communities similar to Aurora. 

He also said he is familiar with and skilled at handling situations when policing “doesn’t go right, when things aren’t done correctly.” He noted his work auditing excessive use-of-force cases, investigating how those incidents happened, who were the officers involved, who were the kinds of people officers tended to use force on, and how the outcome could have been different. 

 “That accountability component is something that I truly believe in,” he said, without mentioning anything about reforming the way wayward officers are disciplined or fired. 

His focus as a police leader, he said, is “not just an issue of was the officer right or wasn’t wrong, but it’s really a question of, again, what could we do to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”

He touted that he has been “at the forefront” of de-escalation training, teaching officers how to speak to potential suspects and exercise patience with them. “All of those things are things that I have honed, in general in my career, and they’re all things that I’m really enthusiastically looking forward to bringing in the city.” 

To questions about a recent influx of Venezuelan migrants to Aurora, and with it unverified reports about presence of gangs, Chamberlain stressed the need to earn trust among the recent arrivals – among others in the community – to report crime.

Part of that trust-building will, by most accounts, lie in whether officers in APD racially and ethnically reflect the demographics in Aurora. Although the department has made some progress toward that goal, it is still a long way off. As of May, more than 72% of officers were white in a city whose population is made up of 51% people of color. 

 “It doesn’t matter if it’s in the city of Los Angeles. It doesn’t matter if it’s the city of Aurora. The most important part to me is that everybody feels that they can come to a police officer.”