AURORA | A private firm monitoring the City of Aurora’s compliance with public safety reforms has again expressed concerns about the police department’s inability to produce data on uses of force and the demographics of people contacted by police, which is more than a year overdue.
“During this reporting period, as noted during the last reporting period, no one in APD has the ability to easily access the data to analyze issues, trends, patterns, or practices,” Florida-based risk management firm IntegrAssure said in its October report. “APD does not have an accurate or reliable way of measuring (the) number and type of use of force incidents and community and officer complaints due to the shortcomings of their current system.”
The document is the fifth regular report evaluating the police department’s compliance with the consent decree agreement between Aurora and the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, which IntegrAssure was hired to oversee in February 2022.
Despite the fact that Aurora police are largely unable to quantify officers’ treatment of residents of color — one of the central concerns raised by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office’s investigation into APD following the death of Elijah McClain was how officers disproportionately used force against non-whites — IntegrAssure was generally laudatory of the police department and its attitude toward reform.
“Aurora leadership at the city level and in both the APD and (Aurora Fire Rescue), as well as the vast majority of rank-and-file members of each department with whom we have spoken, have continued to embrace the need for change, and recognize that a culture of continuous improvement is one that will benefit all,” IntegrAssure said in its report.
Breaking the consent decree down into 79 discrete reforms required of the Aurora Police Department, Aurora Fire Rescue and the Aurora Civil Service Commission, 68 of which were considered in the latest report, IntegrAssure found that the city has so far fully complied with 31 reforms.
Those 31 reforms include 15 related to Aurora Fire Rescue’s use of chemical sedatives, recruitment and training. Another six pertain to the Civil Service Commission’s role in public safety hiring and discipline, and the commission’s submission of new policies to IntegrAssure for review. APD has also complied with 10 reforms related to recruitment and the completion and publication of a new use of force policy and training officers on that policy.
The other 37 reforms considered were found to be in various stages of implementation, with 17 deemed to be on a “cautionary track” because of APD’s data woes and a missed deadline for anti-bias training.
Training against racism
In a section of the report addressing timely issues that have an impact on the reform agreement, IntegrAssure described how the Center for Naval Analyses’ Center for Justice Research and Innovation piloted an anti-bias training session for Aurora police leadership and members of a community panel that was “generally thought by all, including (IntegrAssure), not to entirely meet the needs of APD.”
Specifically, IntegrAssure said attendees criticized the session for a lack of scenario-based training and not being specifically tailored to Aurora. After the session, Aurora police decided to continue working with the CNA to fine-tune their training, while also developing their own anti-bias training.
The deadline for developing anti-bias training came and went in February. At a Oct. 24 town hall meeting convened by the city and IntegrAssure to discuss the report, Acevedo said the department is committed to taking its time to ensure the anti-bias training offered to officers is effective, even if that means overshooting deadlines.
“We don’t want to just check a box,” he said. “We want to ensure that the training we provide is the very best training we can come up with.”
IntegrAssure founder Jeff Schlanger said APD’s own training program was about 85% done, describing it as a program created “by police officers, for police officers.”
“The problem with traditional bias training is that sometimes police officers feel that they are being called racist just by virtue of having to attend this training,” Schlanger said. “And we want to get away from that.”
Also in attendance was Aurora NAACP president Omar Montgomery, who serves as co-chair of the Community Advisory Council, which was created to advise IntegrAssure as to the community’s perception of Aurora’s progress toward reform. He said he believed any anti-bias training needed to include frank discussions about race.
“If we are afraid to talk about race, we’re going to continue to see some of the same problems that we see in our public safety systems,” he said. “This is an important component, especially in the city of Aurora, and especially post-Elijah McClain, that we have to have those tough, courageous conversations.”
Acevedo and Schlanger both said they were committed to addressing race relations in the training offered to police and that community members would be a part of evaluating the training to make sure it meets the needs of Aurora.
When another Community Advisory Council co-chair, Jeanette Rodriguez, questioned whether leaving the task of developing an anti-bias training up to APD was another example of “police policing the police,” Acevedo stressed that the department’s training would be reviewed by members of the community council as well as IntegrAssure before being rolled out and that it is being developed in conjunction with the city’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
“We’re not going to put the stamp of approval. It’s going to be you all, it’s going to be (IntegrAssure), and it’s going to be the community,” Acevedo said.
APD mishandled release of information about Jor’Dell Richardson
IntegrAssure’s report also addressed the June shooting of 14-year-old Jor’Dell Richardson by Aurora police, whose actions during and immediately after the shooting were criticized by reform activists.
Interim police chief Art Acevedo initially told the public that Richardson had a firearm — he had a pellet gun that only resembled a pistol — and told Richardson’s family that the teen did not suffer after he was shot — Richardson remained responsive for more than a minute after being shot in the stomach, screaming, pleading for help and telling officers that he could not breathe.
Internal affairs investigators subsequently signed off on the use of force by officers James Snapp, who chased and tackled Richardson after the teen allegedly participated in an armed robbery and fled from officers, and Roch Gruszeczka, who said he shot Richardson as the teen was reaching for the pellet gun in his waistband. 18th Judicial District Attorney John Kellner declined to file criminal charges against Gruszeczka and Snapp.
IntegrAssure evaluated the internal investigation of Gruszeczka and Snapp and said in its report that the investigation was “conducted in a complete, thorough, objective, and fair manner” and that “APD did not reach any unsupported conclusions based on the facts and applicable policy.”
The firm was, however, critical of how Acevedo and the department shared information about the shooting with the public.
“We found that the department, in many ways, attempted to provide maximum transparency to the public, but failed, in the early stages of the investigation, to best ensure that the information which was being provided to the public was accurate,” the IntegrAssure report says.
“In addition, we found that the department, in its notification to the family, departed from its previous practice with the chief of police personally making the notification, but failed to provide completely accurate information to the family. We did not find any indications that the failures were intentional. However, we believe the failure could have and should have been avoided.”
Lack of data critical to monitor progress
IntegrAssure’s report commented at length on APD’s failure to introduce a data system tracking uses of force, leaving the department unable to automatically pull up information about officers’ past uses of force and violations of the department’s use of force policy, which was recently rewritten.
Information about the outcomes of citizen complaints is also not easily accessible, and the department has yet to implement a system allowing for the retrieval of aggregate information about when and how officers stop members of the public, despite creating a new form last year for police to use when recording data about encounters.
The firm noted that, since 2012, the department changed how it tracked uses of force and complaints multiple times without documenting those changes, meaning it is unclear how the changes impacted recordkeeping.
“These historical and present deficiencies are extremely concerning, notwithstanding the prospective introduction of a new system which is not expected to be able to deal adequately with historical data,” IntegrAssure wrote. “Simply put, the deficiencies in APD’s current data system need to be fixed immediately for APD to become a data-driven agency.”
IntegrAssure blamed APD’s contractor, Benchmark Analytics, for the department overshooting its July 2022 deadline for collecting use-of-force metrics and problems managing data about stops, and suggested that the department should consider finding another vendor if Benchmark Analytics is unable to deliver.
IntegrAssure said it would be working with Aurora police on “stopgap measures” to improve data collection until the new systems are in place.
During the Oct. 24 town hall, Schlanger said the department has begun holding weekly meetings with the contractor, and that the related delays “are being addressed appropriately.”
“The concerns relative to data are being addressed, not as fast as any of us would like, but are being addressed,” Schlanger said.
The idea that we will have an honest conversation on race is laughable. Right now, we are following a false narrative about race. Race was not the problem at APD. The Attorney General labeled a bunch of incidents as racist when there was nothing to indicate that race was an issue other than that the people were black. For someone who is part of the justice system and should be used to dealing with facts and not supposition, this is a grievous error. The citizen activists have said that they don’t even want the police to have a voice in anything. Where is the honest conversation and transparency? The idea that we can make the racial arrest and contact statistics proportional is a blatant lie. So, let us have an honest conversation on the statistics. Other cities, including truth, light, and beauty Boulder have statistics that are more disproportionate. The Attorney General has not blessed them with a consent decree. Further, all of the studies show that blacks are disproportionately involved in crime. The only way to make the statistics proportionate is to simply no longer do the job of enforcing the laws. Since minority areas are disproportionately affected by crime, they are the victims when we fail to police. The greatest threat to a young black male is another black male. They are the leading cause of death for other black males. The majority of the mass shootings we see are the result of black males shooting at each and hitting a bunch of other people. Th media goes out of its way to avoid mentioning race in those shootings. It is only when we see a large scale mass shooter that we see the shooter. No honest conversation there. Black culture has a problem with their youth. We are dancing all around to avoid any honest conversation about race. The City boasted about using data to address crime. Silly boast, since data stats have been used forever to direst police resources. After the results of the first effort were published, they had to admit that the stats were disproportionate. There has been no more mention of the results of their data based policing. If you direct your efforts toward the high crime areas based upon reported crime, you will be dealing with black suspects. No way to avoid that. So, when they say we should have an honest conversation on race, you can laugh that off. In the same way, you can laugh off efforts to give the Chief more power to address problems. APD has already suffered from the fact that the officers cannot tell you what is going on. Politician chiefs have run the department based on favoritism and fear for a long time. To give them more power to keep officers from being able to speak honestly is contradictory to the supposed goal of transparency. You should understand that the problem has always been unethical leadership. The fact that you think that the officers need bias training is an example. What do you think good leadership should have been doing all of these years? Good leadership should have been emphasizing respect and fair treatment everyday for the last sixty years. Good leadership should have been making sure that officers were well trained in all aspects of the job. Good leadership should have made sure that all of their supervisors were demonstrating professional and ethical conduct very day as an example to their officers. Ask yourself how well trained and supervised the officers were in the protests after George Floyd. The tactics were poor and the leadership was nonexistent. Why don’t they know better? Did you pay attention to the fact that the officers said after those events that they had no faith or guidance from their leadership. Pay attention. Politicians are leading the police and snowing you with phony, feel good talk. Meanwhile, they will not stand up for the extreme problems created by the “police reform bill” and the erroneous logic in the consent decree. Real honest conversations and transparency are a threat to the powers that be and the activists.
Typical MAGA idiot
Dark Hole, Back up your MAGA Idiot comment with facts showing anything Mr. Black wrote about is untrue. Mr. Black’s statements about black on black violence can be backed up everyday with news articles from around the country. One does not even need to venture away from the Denver metro area to see black on black violence is the real threat to black people; especially young black males. People are afraid to say the truth out of fear of being called a racist. The facts don’t lie. Instead of blaming everyone else for the epidemic levels of black on black violence, let’s all hold the violent offenders accountable, and send a message that any violence is no longer going to be accepted in the community.