Photo by PHILIP B. POSTON/Sentinel Colorado
AURORA | The Aurora City Council will begin reviewing a slew of ambitious police policy change recommendations Monday crafted by Aurora’s Community Police Task Force.
The expansive recommendations include a detailed call for a powerful new police independent oversight office with legal tools to investigate and fire police accused of breaking the law or department policy.
The city council will begin considering whether to adopt the long-awaited recommendations during a study session at 6:30 p.m. Aurorans can stream the meeting at www.auroratv.org or watch Channel 8.
The city’s Community Police Task Force submitted its ideas in March after meeting for months. Its members include prominent Black community leaders and some activist leaders who led enormous marches for racial justice during the summer of 2020.
Dr. Ryan Ross, who facilitated the Task Force meetings, submitted the recommendations to city officials. The document cautions that the ideas “are not a blind attack on law enforcement.”
According to the document, the Task Force members received education on a laundry list of police policies and practices when writing the recommendations. That included training to understand excessive force and police substance abuse policies, Aurora’s discipline process, use of force reporting, and internal department reviews and investigations. Members also scrutinized other independent watchdog models, which vary widely among U.S. cities.
The Task Force’s main recommendation is the creation of an “independent citizen’s oversight office.” It would be called the Office of Police Accountability, Transparency and Transformation.
In the proposal, the watchdog would have more power than independent monitors in Boulder and Denver — the only two cities in Colorado with a watchdog in place. The recommendations also tick some key boxes for national police oversight experts, who told the Sentinel last week that subpoena power in particular is important to effectively holding police accountable.
Aurora’s watchdog would “have broad investigatory and subpoena powers that review and resolve civilian complaints, investigate critical incidents, and regularly assess Aurora Police Department policies and practices.” Its power would be equal to the city’s Civil Service Commission, which currently has the final word on police and fire department terminations.
Crucially, the Task Force wants the watchdog to have some power to enforce its opinions. That would include the power to overturn the results of police discipline investigations when members aren’t satisfied. The Task Force recommends that, when the Civil Service Commission “fails” its responsibilities regarding officer discipline, the watchdog office would have the “default” responsibility to reexamine the case.
To that end, the Task Force wants the office to hold subpoena power, which would allow independent investigators to legally compel cops’ compliance.
And the oversight office would be able to consult with the state Attorney General’s office to help bring criminal charges against police officers accused of breaking the law.
In the Task Force’s vision, the watchdog would be staffed by Aurora residents who aren’t active law enforcement members, representing each ward in the city. Some staff would serve as processional liaisons. The office would have its own budget.
Aurora city officials endorsed a general concept of an “independent monitor” earlier this year, although it’s unclear whether they’ll back this plan to create a powerful civilian oversight agency. The Aurora city council holds the final word on whether some, or all of, the recommendations will see the light of day.
Police associations have generally opposed giving civilians the power to scrutinize cops’ behavior, let alone fire a police officer or help bring criminal charges.
Marc Sears, president of Aurora’s Fraternal Order of Police chapter, said in December that Aurora would “burn down” if lawmakers implement ideas from the Task Force.
Other powers in the Task Force’s watchdog plans include: reviewing citizen complaints about officers; reviewing body-worn camera footage; helping hire police officers and conduct exit interviews; and reviewing data on police stops, use of force incidents and disciplinary actions.
Not all of the recommendations are concerned with police accountability.
Notably, the Task Force recommended pairing APD officers with mental health experts who would respond to certain crises as a team. It’s unclear whether that would complement the city’s existing program dispatching mental health experts to some 911 calls without police officers.
The Task Force also recommends spending more money on mental health screening for officers and crisis response training. The supports would help prevent officers from “development mental illnesses such as anxiety, depression, PTSD and burnout.”
Let’s examine how fair this group might be. If they are afraid of any real police input in creating recommendations, why would we expect that they would be fair or informed in their oversight? The investigation that was conducted by the three person panel is badly skewed and has a few outright lies in it. If we are afraid to address any of that and we only allow one narrative about racism and brutality, why would we believe that suddenly a review by many of the same people will be fair. If you think that you are getting an informed discussion and explanation from a politician chief like Vanessa Wilson, you are mistaken. The police officers know that they don’t have anyone to back them up, even when they are right. That leaves them with two choices. Leave the job or do nothing on the street. Either way, the community will suffer. The uninformed and vaguely worded police reform bill has already crippled police departments. The chiefs won’t tell you that and experts don’t have any voice in our media today. If I get this published, it only reaches a few people. Police work has stress and countless legal decisions to make. Young officers, particularly. make mistakes. When fighting someone, it is easy to do something that someone will consider excessive. In the past, those were dealt with by supervisors and command staff. For the most part, they were dealt with appropriately. But there were many failures due primarily to the failure to hire professional police chiefs. The human tendency to hire a smooth talking political “yes person” gave departments people who worried about their power and control and not about professionalizing the department. They ignored needs for training, played favorites in discipline, ignored racist supervisors whom they liked, and a plethora of other sins. The sergeants were able to shield their officers from some of this and try to develop young officers. There were many incidents of conduct that were ignored by command, often in the command staff itself. There was simple fix for that which would have corrected most of the problems. Allowing officers to debate the chief in front of the public where it could not be resolved internally would have fixed most problems. Naturally, city management would not allow that because it might reflect badly upon them and expose what kind of person they had made chief.
Let’s talk about mental health. Do you think the police wanted to be left solely to deal with mental health problems? Why do you think it developed that way? The politicians decided to save money and did away with most of the mental health capabilities. We would take the person to be evaluated and they were released almost immediately. Would we rather there be a comprehensive mental health system to help people? Of course. Do we also know that people in mental health crisis will be unpredictably violent? Do we know that some of them will force officers to shoot them before anything else can be done. You bet. Reality of life. Tell me that the mental health worker could have talked to the shooter at the King Supers in Boulder.
If the present narrative is so badly skewed, even by President Biden and our own state legislature, what chance is there that officers will have a fair examination of incidents by a poorly informed citizen review group? If our own chief doesn’t know much about use of force, what chance is there that a monitor will know enough to be fair. As a use of force expert, I spent a great deal of time trying to educate our own police staff and to force them to do the proper, adequate, consistent, and regular training that would would prevent excessive force.
There is a great deal more to say. You will never hear it. The shallow narrative of a radical few is all you will be allowed to hear. I realize that you have lives and not enough time to look in depth. But the people you are leaving it up to are not the right people to fix the problems. Now the legislature is about to create chaos in our schools with the same twisted narrative. I wish all of us luck in the future.
Anyone know that THREE of the protesters in the captioned photo above (Candice Bailey, Terrance Roberts, and Lindsey Minter, all of the Frontline Party for Revolutionary Action (FPRA) serve on this so-called Community Police Task Force?
“Not a blind attack on law enforcement.”
I’ll believe that when I see it. But Aurora’s city council is more interested in populism than in fair accountability. Oversight is fine, but I’m tired of the witch hunt that public discourse about the police has become.
The city clowncil is only ensuring that crime will increase
Shootings in the city have increased in recent months, with a 73% increase in incidents during which a bullet struck a person’s flesh in 2020, according to Aurora Police department data.
I hope that the City Council can see through this BS. This was once Nationalize Recognized Police Department that people wanted to work for. This will discourage quality people coming to the Aurora PD. Just look at how many people have left over the last year to see how this cities politicians and some of these very radical ideas are driving people away.
Why not work on solutions to correct the real problems. The idea of a citizen oversight committee that can fire an officer without knowing how the officers are trained.