CHIEFLY SPEAKING: Aurora’s new police Chief Chamberlain offers Q&A with the Sentinel

AURORA | Todd Chamberlain was on his ninth day as Aurora’s latest police chief when he sat down Tuesday to speak with the Sentinel. 

His arrival comes as the city keeps making national and even international headlines for election season exaggerations — spurred largely by right-wing City Councilmember Daniel Jurinsky and, to a lesser extent, Mayor Mike Coffman and propelled by GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump — about the extent of violence by Venezuelan immigrants living in the city.

“The nine days seem like, like about 40 years,” he told us. “It’s a lot, but I’ve been very appreciative of all of it.” 

The former commander from the Los Angeles Police Department is the seventh person to lead Aurora’s approximately 700-person department in five years. His selection for the $250,000-a-year job spurred criticisms by civil rights watchdogs for having been decided behind closed doors, without input from the public, at a time when the department is being forced by the state to address its pattern of racial profiling and excessive force and to mend its relationship with the community.

Greeting us with a disarmingly strong handshake, Chamberlain welcomed us Tuesday in his yet-undecorated office where only a map of the city and a police department organizational chart hang on the walls. He met with other metro media throughout the day. Here are some excerpts from our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.

The Sentinel: You’ve spoken a lot during your first few days here about the importance of transparency and trust in the police department. Why?

Chamberlain: This is an organization that I think people need to know what’s going on behind, you know, the smoke and mirrors. I think they need to know what’s going on behind the curtain. I want to get that out, and I want people to have faith in what we’re doing, that we’re trying our best to do our best for the right reasons and the right purpose.

Yeah, there’s going to be incidents that are going to come out badly, and there’s going to be things, you know, that’s not going to stop. There are still going to be dramatic incidents. There’s still going to be use-of-forces. There’s still going to be shootings. But I want to tell the story of everything else that’s going on that’s good.

Like the fact that year to date, we are at about 186,000 calls for service, people who have reached out to Aurora PD, and said, “Hey, we want you here. I’ve been victimized. I’ve been mistreated. There’s something I don’t want to deal with. There’s something I’m stepping away from, and I want somebody to step into it.” Of those, there’s a total of about 465 use-of-forces, which could range from an officer grabbing your wrist to an officer-involved shooting. That comes out to about .3% of calls for service. And when you look at officer-involved shootings right now, this year to date, we’re at two, which comes out to about .0001% of the total calls for service. 

That’s the story that I don’t think people hear. I think they think that everyday officers are just out there running amok, and every day things are happening, and it’s going crazy and it’s going wrong. But there’s a lot of things that officers are doing that are right. There’s a lot of communication they’re having that’s correct. There’s a lot of intervention and prevention that they’re doing that are changing people’s lives every single day. And again, when you look at those numbers, and you look at those use-of-force numbers, that brings a little clarity. 

Each one of those officer-involved shootings, they’re a tragedy. They’re a tragedy for the person. They’re a tragedy for the families. They’re a tragedy for the department. They’re a tragedy for the officers that have to experience that. But they are not the norm. That is really a very, very, very, very small percentage of what actually occurs. But unfortunately, the other stuff that occurs never gets talked about, never gets discussed. 

The Sentinel: One challenge your predecessors faced as police chief was interference from certain City Council members. How are you going to do things differently and make sure that doesn’t happen under your leadership?

Chamberlain: I think we just have to find a spot where we are working in collaboration, where we are doing it in a process that’s the most effective for everybody, and we are having a relationship that’s built on the trust that I will do my best job and I bring the experience of running a law enforcement agency. Council members have their own experiences and knowledge, but it’s not about how to run a law enforcement agency. And that’s why I believe they hired me.

The Sentinel: Is it more your style to have more direct contact with the city council, or have the city manager — whom you directly report to — be the conduit? 

Chamberlain: We’re hoping for the latter. I’m hoping that the city council, if there’s issues or concerns, that we definitely have that conversation, but I’m hoping that it’s more vetted through the city manager.

And I really hope that we’re looking at the same items, we’re looking at the same issues, the same complexities of the issues, and we’re moving in the same direction to solve that. I think what is detrimental is if you have a million people focusing only on what is their concern or their primary issue. I think that can cause distraction. 

That’s really what my role is going to be — to say these are the things we’ve identified that we’re going to focus on and here’s what our primary goal is in this organization. 

The Sentinel: You’ve said several times now that you’ll be focused on three aspects of the department: crime, community and risk. What specifically do you mean by that?

Chamberlain: On crime, I want to bring in more technology to focus on not only identifying what kinds of crimes are happening, but also where they’re happening, who are the individuals involved in it, who they are affecting, what are the demographics of the individuals involved and the victims, and where can we do intervention and prevention. I look forward to using an evidence-based approach that will let us look at whether our programs and responses have been effective, and if not, how we can change them. 

The community aspect, again, I think it’s a lot about building trust and earning faith that  my words are going to be a reflection of what my actual actions are. I look forward to that opportunity to do that with the communities that I serve. But really what I look forward to doing is setting that tone and that idea through this entire organization because I can go out there and be the happiest guy in the world, telling the community group everything they want to hear, but if I have an officer that doesn’t buy into that philosophy or ideas, and they’re stopping that person at 2 or 3 in the morning and they treat them terribly, or they get involved in bad situations, and it’s like, well, who cares who’s sitting up on the top of the chair if the people that are actually doing the work don’t adhere to what that vision is? So to me, it’s not just about me going to the barbecues and award ceremonies and things like that. It’s about really instilling what community policing is to this organization and having it pressed down through every level of this organization. That’s what I’m really excited about.

I’m very aware of risk, and want to understand what the risk mitigation issues are within this agency. I want to look at officers that are performing well, and I want to acknowledge them, and I also want to identify officers that are having problems. I want to find out where training needs can be improved, where we can change the trajectory of somebody who is on a bad path, where they’ve been involved in too many use-of-forces or too many complaints. How can we retrain? Or how can we say, “Hey, you might need to go somewhere else.” And the only way you can do that again is through analysis and statistics. 

The Sentinel: As for the risk part, are you looking to address that through internal affairs or a new part of the department? 

Chamberlain: I’m not really looking at internal affairs. I think that’s a really incredibly important component to do the investigation after an incident occurs, but I’m looking at what can we do to prevent it before it occurs. 

And so just this week, I instituted a new office under special operations called the Office of Constitutional policing. And what we’re going to do is focus on some of the issues in the consent decree such as biased policing. Is bias policing an issue? Are we addressing it? Are we effectively addressing it? We’ll be looking at use-of-force cases. And we’ll ask if we need to give different training on communication to officers? I want to have spot audits on how our officers are relating to community members. Are they talking to them with emotional intelligence? Are there better ways they can communicate better with people? We’re going to be looking at our training on all that. 

The Sentinel: Former President Donald Trump has said he’s coming to Aurora soon to address issues around the immigrant population — especially Venezuelans — here. What’s your take on such a visit? 

Chamberlain: I think right now it’s up in the air. If he comes, great, we’ll support it and we’ll make it happen. If he doesn’t come, that’s his decision.

The Sentinel: Do you wish he wouldn’t come, given the misinformation he has repeated about Aurora’s Venezuelan immigrant community and the extent of violence here by Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang otherwise known as TdA?

Chamberlain: Maybe a conversation with me might bring some clarity to what he’s talking about. And I wish that would happen, because again I think you have to have clarity to make it more reality-based, and not the moral panic that I think we’re at now. I think there are incredibly dynamic issues with the Venezuelan community, with the TdA issue, but I think it has to be a measured approach to what are the real issues and how can we effectively work on those.

The Sentinel: You seem to look at — or at least speak of — Venezuelan immigrants with more complexity and empathy than some politicians in the city. Will that be a challenge as chief?

Chamberlain: That’s why I’m very thankful I’m here at the very beginning of this controversy. As law enforcement, we do not handle immigration. Immigration is handled through the White House. It’s handled through the federal government. And again, however they get here, however they arrive, whatever that situation is, once they drop down, our job and our role is to provide for their safety, whether they’re documented or whether they’re undocumented. I don’t care less. I care that they feel comfortable enough and safe enough to have contact with us so that we can identify what their issues are, what their problems are, and hold TdA members or anyone else accountable if they’re victimizing them, victimizing people of their own ethnicity. And that’s what I want to make sure we stop at the beginning, as opposed to allowing this to grow.