AURORA | Backup is on the way for the cops of the Aurora Police Department, who for years have been stretched thin as the city’s sworn police force has dwindled.
As of Tuesday, 63 recruits were making their way through academy training as part of three classes — the largest group of students that APD instructors have gotten to work with at one time since at least 2020.
“It’s a big morale boost for the rest of the agency,” said Lt. Justin Shipley, who directs the police academy located at the City of Aurora Public Safety Training Center. “Every time I’m outside of this building, the first thing people ask me is, ‘How many people do we have in the academy?’”
The news comes about three and a half years after nationwide protests that coincided with a spike in public suspicion toward law enforcement as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, which upended the country’s job market.
Since then, the coronavirus has mostly faded into the background, and the wooden boards have been pulled down that protected the windows of the Aurora Municipal Center from being smashed by rioters long after the officer-involved killings of George Floyd and Elijah McClain.
Interim police chief Heather Morris said she thinks APD has built bridges between residents of color and officers since 2022, when the department began operating under its consent decree reform agreement with the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.
The company hired to monitor the implementation of the agreement commissioned a survey of residents in 2022 — at the time, just 34% of all survey-takers, including 26% of Black respondents, said the police department was doing a good or excellent job.
“I think that has changed, and a lot of that is going to be due to our training,” Morris said, mentioning the various types of education mandated by the consent decree, which is meant to improve the outcomes of encounters between officers and residents of color.
“Overwhelmingly, the community supports our officers,” she said. “Sometimes that might not be the perception.”
As part of the reform agreement, Aurora has also overhauled its recruitment and hiring processes, which Morris said has made it easier to welcome qualified candidates into the department.
Aurora first reported a boom in new recruits in September, when more than 30 prospective officers entered the academy as Class 2023-3B, bringing the total number of recruits undergoing academy training to 46 compared to 12 the month prior.
The current roster of 63 includes two classes of new recruits as well as a class of recruits with prior law enforcement experience. The September class is scheduled to graduate in March.
Law enforcement agencies across the country have continued to lose officers faster than they can hire and train recruits, with the Police Executive Research Forum reporting last year that police forces surveyed by the organization shrank by about 5% since 2020. Aurora’s sworn force shrank by 7% during that time.
Even though regional and national police recruitment statistics since September are scarce, Morris said the department’s hard work to turn its staffing shortage around is bearing fruit in its academy.
“Our recruiters really do an amazing job,” she said. “But I really believe that recruiting is every officer’s job. A lot of the recruits that come through are actually from our own officers who are not in recruiting, who are out there encouraging people and talking to people about becoming police officers.”
In the thick of too-thin ranks
Officers who have stuck with the Aurora Police Department through recent years have had to pick up the work left by an exodus of fellow cops retiring and resigning.
The department began seeing an unchecked outflow of officers after the size of its sworn police force peaked in fall 2020, with 777 officers employed as of Sept. 15, including fully-trained officers as well as those undergoing field and academy training.
By August 2023, just 666 sworn officers were employed by APD, representing the city’s smallest police force since fall 2014, when Aurora was home to about 44,000 fewer people. Of those 666 officers, 591 were active and trained, meaning one in every five sworn positions was either vacant or filled by an officer in training or on leave.
As numbers dwindled last year, police and city officials said the shortage was forcing the remaining officers to rack up overtime and skip earned vacation days. The amount of overtime worked by officers climbed from 61,223 hours in 2019 to 83,323 hours in 2023, according to police and the city.
Officials warned last year that a combination of burnout and frustration over a flurry of scandals involving APD were dragging down morale within the department.
“The men and the women are so beat up, and they’re just so tired,” Marc Sears, the president of Aurora’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 49, said last spring. “We don’t have the numbers right now, and it’s very, very obvious.”
Meanwhile, the department’s top cops said Aurora was going out of its way to entice as many qualified candidates as possible to apply for jobs, keep in regular touch with applicants and streamline APD’s monthslong hiring process in a manner consistent with the consent decree.
The responsibility for conducting background investigations has been transferred away from the Aurora Civil Service Commission, which Morris said has expedited the screening process, and the police department now plays a greater role in screening applicants alongside the commission and the city’s Human Resources Department.
The commission also voted to eliminate some of the caveats that previously required the city to reject applications for aspiring cops and firefighters. Those automatic disqualifiers included applicants forgetting to fill out any part of the application as well as past convictions for certain crimes and evidence of dishonesty that emerged during the vetting process.
Also in 2023, the department doubled down on its efforts to encourage women and people of color to consider careers in policing.
APD announced its participation in the 30×30 Initiative, a pledge to increase the proportion of women in recruit classes to 30% by 2030, which the department is striving to achieve through informational academies geared toward women, partnering with organizations serving women and highlighting Aurora’s female officers in marketing and promotional materials.
The department also worked to expand its presence throughout the community by sending members to take part in town halls, community events, veteran outreach and military transition programs, and outreach work done by churches and nonprofits.
IntegrAssure, which the city hired in 2022 to monitor the implementation of the consent decree, identified these efforts and APD’s work to spark interest in law enforcement careers at local high schools and community colleges as ways in which the agency was trying to reach a more diverse cross-section of the community, in part to help with recruitment.
The decree itself envisions Aurora’s police becoming more representative of the community in terms of gender and race — in its 2021 investigative report preceding the decree, the AG’s office wrote that “communities are more likely to trust police departments with cultural awareness, language skills, and similar backgrounds to the members of the community that they serve.”
The recruits making their way through the academy today are more diverse in terms of race and gender than the police force as a whole, though new officers are still more likely to be white and male than the average Aurora resident.
About 48% of recruits in the three classes are white, while 35% are Hispanic, 11% are Black, 3% are Asian, 1% are Native American, and 0.1% are Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders. In terms of gender, 13% of those recruits are women.
By comparison, Aurora’s sworn officers are about 72% white, 13% Hispanic, 4% Black, 3% Asian, 1% Native American and 0.1% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders, while 5% identify as two or more races and the race of 9% of employees is unknown. About 11% of all officers are female.
As for Aurora as a whole, about 43% of residents are white, 30% are Hispanic, 16% are Black, 6% are Asian, 0.4% are Native American, 0.3% are Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders and 0.4% are some other race, with 5% identifying as two or more races. according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Morris said she is confident the department’s changes to hiring and recruitment will continue to push Aurora’s police force in the direction of being more representative of the residents it serves.
“We’re recruiting from our neighborhoods,” Morris said. “We’re going to get to the point where the department looks like the community. I think that’s really important.”
She also expressed excitement about the cadet program being developed in conjunction with the Community College of Aurora and lauded the seminars launched by the department that give interested candidates the chance to learn more about the agency as well as try their mettle at the department’s physical fitness and agility test.
APD still has a long way to go to rebuild its numbers — in mid-January, the department’s sworn force included 684 officers, just 583 of whom were active and fully trained. A total of 748 sworn police positions have been budgeted for by the city.
However, from Morris’ perspective, the department’s investment in recruiting is already paying off. While the size of the upcoming June academy cohort is still being determined, Morris said the department could welcome as many as 60 new recruits in the class.
“And we’ll do whatever we need to do in terms of staffing the academy so we can accommodate and get everybody trained, even if it means I have to go down there and do some training,” she said.
It’s hard to say how much of the boom in Aurora’s academy attendance is due to each of the changes made by the city versus public trust in APD and police in general beginning to rebound. The city and APD inherited much of the hiring process from the Civil Service Commission while candidates were being hired for the September 2023 academy class.
In its October report on APD’s implementation of the consent decree, IntegrAssure said the September class represented a “monumental shift” in class size from June, when just nine people entered the academy.
“The monitor will be conducting a deep-dive assessment to fully understand the contributing factors to the success, and how to best ensure the success is replicated for each incoming class,” the report promised.
IntegrAssure also said it had found that “a majority of the applicants leave the hiring process due to lack of engagement and follow up from the city” — city spokesman Matthew Brown said the redesigned hiring process allows Aurora to extend preliminary job offers to candidates in a matter of weeks instead of several months, and Morris said the department has tried to combine steps in the process to avoid inconveniencing applicants.
At the time that the Civil Service Commission voted to do away with the rules automatically disqualifying candidates for lying or being convicted of a recent DUI, reckless driving charge or other crimes, some community members questioned whether the change could lead to a greater number of unsuitable candidates making it through the hiring process.
Morris said that, in practice, the department will not extend a job offer to someone who lies on their application or has otherwise demonstrated untruthfulness. She said the elimination of the automatic disqualifiers was meant to give the city’s hiring panel the latitude to look past isolated incidents that happened in a candidate’s past.
“We look at the whole person,” she said. “It hurts everybody when you bring people in just to fill a seat. I’d rather have an empty classroom than put people in the seats that really shouldn’t be there.”
The chief said she was not aware of the department tracking the number of recruits who would have been disqualified under the old rules.
Lindsay Minter, a local reform activist who previously expressed concerns about opening the door for candidates with a history of integrity problems to become police officers, said she was still alarmed by some of the officers recently hired to work at APD, like the officer who previously threatened to sic a police dog on Elijah McClain and was reinstated last year.
However, she said the mere fact that Aurora is welcoming more recruits did not give her pause, even though she continues to worry about the city’s ability to weed out troubled candidates.
Qusair Mohamedbhai, an attorney for the family of Elijah McClain, said he was heartened by the progress Aurora has made toward welcoming people of color into the department.
“We should be promoting our youth from all cultures and national origins to be considering careers in law enforcement,” he said. “To the extent that these changes have increased the number of cadets in the academy, I think that’s something to be commended by the community.”
Regarding the removal of automatic disqualifiers, Mohamedbhai brought up how some Aurora police officers had no criminal history before becoming involved in criminal misconduct and said he supported the department’s ability to look past crimes in a candidate’s past to holistically evaluate their fitness for police work.
“One of the main things we should be considering as a community is, what does it actually take to be a successful police officer? Many of us have our ideas, and we have a certain look or a certain background that we jump to,” he said.
“I don’t spare the lash with Aurora, but you have to be an honest broker about things, and there is an absolute need to have more police officers as Aurora grows in size, and this seems like a step in the right direction.”
Help is on the way
Shipley said the influx of recruits has generated a buzz throughout the department and provided a welcome change for instructors, who feel like they’re able to leverage their experience to help more young police officers.
“The fun of this assignment is the recruits in the academy are just so happy to be here, and they’re soaking up knowledge,” Shipley said.
“Whether I do an academy of two or I do an academy of 30, it’s the same effort. We have to do the same syllabus. We have to do the same scheduling. We have to reserve the spaces the same. And the staff enjoys it, because we get that many more people through the process.”
Learning the ropes of law enforcement as part of a larger class also teaches recruits how to work with different types of people and helps instructors instill the ethos that members of Aurora’s police force depend on one another for success, Shipley said.
“We try to really impress upon them that the police department is a family,” he said.
Training has evolved since Shipley’s graduation from the Aurora academy two decades ago, placing more of an emphasis on scenario-based training designed to bridge the gap between learning in a classroom and learning on the job.
Last week, recruits in Class 2023-3B ran through a series of simulated responses to calls that tested their decision-making and ability to prioritize different types of calls under pressure. Other cops, including field training officers, played the roles of bystanders, assailants and people in crisis.
During one scenario, recruits were expected to de-escalate a man aiming a firearm at his own head. In another scenario, which Shipley said was designed to incorporate much of the training up to that point, recruits were called out to simulated suspicious person calls and then received a call about an individual fighting an officer, which they were expected to leave to help with immediately.
After driving to the location of the fight, some of the recruits subdued the attacker, using a restraint device to immobilize his body, while other recruits kept an eye on officers posing as bystanders, who tried to inch closer as they shouted at and filmed the recruits.
The students then debriefed with one of the department’s field training sergeants, Mike Tilton, who encouraged students to use their judgment when responding to a low-priority call if they heard an urgent situation unfolding over their radio, such as an officer in distress.
He also stressed the importance of knowing what level of force was appropriate to use in a given situation so recruits wouldn’t feel the need to hesitate or guess in a real-life encounter.
“If you don’t know where you stand in terms of what you can do, you’re going to dance around it,” Tilton told the recruits.
Besides putting more of an emphasis on scenario-based training, Shipley said the academy has also become the launch pad for training programs for current officers rolled out under the city’s consent decree with the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, including education about uses of force and intervening if another officer is observed using excessive force.
Per the consent decree, police recruits are also being trained alongside new firefighters to help them understand the dynamics of working with other first responders at incident scenes. Shipley said there were close to 90 aspiring cops and firefighters training simultaneously at the City of Aurora Public Safety Training Center as of last week.
Shipley said recruits have told instructors that they were drawn by the training opportunities and numerous special units operated by Aurora. And he said at least one student specifically credited her decision to become an Aurora cop to the department’s 30×30 Initiative.
When asked how police recruits understand the reform process that is ongoing in the police department, Shipley said they are eager to take an active role in improving the department.
“When we talk to these recruits that come here, a lot of them tell us, ‘I’m here because I’m excited for the change that’s happening in Aurora, and I want to be part of that,’” Shipley said.
“These recruits that we’re seeing, they’re motivated. They really believe in their heart of hearts that they’re going to make a difference in this society. And they’re ready to step forward and just make it a better place to be.”
Morris said that, while the process of developing policies and trainings to fulfill the consent decree has been a “heavy lift” for senior officers in the department, rank-and-file cops are adapting to the new expectations for police work.
“We’re working with less and less, and so I’ve got to give a shout-out to them,” Morris said, adding that she believes the three latest classes of recruits are already a good fit.
“The biggest, No. 1 thing that I’ve heard from recruits is that they want to help,” she said. “They want to help the community, and they want to help do the work that needs to be done.”
excellent news and great article by Max. I think he covered all the details. New ideas and new training and new perspective. The “consent degree” maybe be working!
So…. liars and criminals are welcome. Should be a defense attorney’s dream to get those officers on the stand.
Great news.
Continue the new transparency and be diligent about accountability.
Welcome new recruits!
Dead men walking.
Spent some of my younger years growing up in Aurora. Glad to see recruitment is up and if I was a young man I might try out for the team. Aurora has changed from when I was a boy. It seems more dangerous now with shootings and other types of violence. How can a bigger better police force change the culture of violence? Police may not be the best tool for this– other systems need to change too.
good news for our community!
So, we are about to get a large influx of inexperienced officers who were selected less rigourously than in the past. They will be field trained then turned loose on the worst and most problematic shifts, nights and weekends, as the more experienced officers get their pick of shifts and assignments. Sounds like a recipe for a bump in lawsuits.
If the consent decree is to really accomplish anything field training should be extended. The training officers need to be evaluated more often to see what they are training, good policing or indoctrination into the blue cult. Then, the young and inexpereinced should be given shifts and assignments for a time that will be less high risk before getting assigned to those shifts where folks tend to be intoxicated and combative.
Aurora continues to lie about staffing numbers. There is a 2 per 1000 citizens, voter approved mandate, that the city is collecting taxes on. With that number the staffing numbers should be 800. They keep collecting the taxes but not giving the benefit. Where is our refund?
Even with the number of recruits in training, the number of certified officers is at a 5 year low. Most agencies are admitting the problem to the citizens but Aurora just keeps putting lipstick on that pig.
The city needs to address the retention problem. The number of officers retiring and just leaving the force is out pacing hiring in the end. Aurora is a horrible agency to work for and many are leaving for better management and working conditions.