The Sentinel Editorial Board extends its deepest sympathies to Todd Chamberlain, Aurora’s newest police chief.
The former Los Angeles Police Department commander was politically assaulted and injured — two weeks before he even starts the job — by the very city officials who hired him.
Although the media and the community continue to do due diligence in checking the long professional history of Chamberlain, a career police officer who spent decades of service for LAPD, from what we know so far, he appears qualified and competent.
The City of Aurora, however, has already hobbled Chamberlain with ponderous political baggage simply because city officials unwisely cut the public out of the hiring and vetting process.
It was a needless and possibly catastrophic gaffe.
The entire world knows about the horrors of the Aurora Police Department.
They’ve seen the drunken cop passed out behind the wheel of his squad car, later kept on the force.
The public has a vivid memory of six young Black women and girls forced out of their car and made to lie face-down on hot parking lot asphalt, abused by police after a bogus “arrest.”
There was a pistol whipper, a cop who called Black witnesses “porch monkeys” and kept his job for years, and a former, recent police chief who protected a top commander who lied about her involvement in an illegal domestic violation in Denver.
This is the police department infamous for the killing of Elijah McClain, and so much more.
This is a police department that has destroyed the trust of the people of color in the community it serves, as well as the tens of thousands of white people who also insist that the abuse of force must stop.
This is a department that employs hundreds of honest, faithful and skilled police officers. Yet they, too, are regularly bludgeoned by a police administration and city council that cannot avoid regular self-immolation amid endless political and administrative blunders.
Job One is correcting what the Colorado Attorney General investigation clearly identified as “patterns and practices” of racially based abuse of force.
But just as important is lifting the insular, good-ole-boy cloak of sworn secrecy that has worked to destroy the public’s trust in the Aurora police department.
It is no secret, every other embattled and beleaguered police department in the nation, and every highly-paid consultant they hire to dig them out of their quagmires, insist that transparency, accountability and community engagement are critical to restoring quality police service and public trust.
Aurora police are languishing for the lack of public trust.
Given that the city is desperate for a chief that can help restore that trust, it is astonishing that the city management and city council robbed the public of that critically needed exercise in the hiring of Chamberlain.
We, and the public, perfectly understand the age-old argument about hiring top city officials in a publicized arena. It’s a valid argument that a chief, a city manager or any top government official risks souring their current employment relationship by being outed as “job shopping.”
But nothing stopped the city council or city management from announcing Chamberlain as a finalist in the search, pending community engagement and city council ratification.
What’s so astonishing is that it is exactly what the city has done in the past with other police chief candidates, long before Aurora’s reputation became so sullied.
Chamberlain’s priority on Sept. 9, when he is sworn in, should have been to assure the community he is professionally capable of supervising the state-mandated Aurora police reforms which have already been identified.
Chamberlain should immediately tell the public how he will roll out and ensure those reforms, and that he can work to protect the public from an increasingly complex and dynamic catalog of crime problems.
Instead, his first and most important duty now is to try and counter the mistrust already piled onto his tenure. He must immediately spend time cleaning up his already tarnished image.
During his introduction to the community last week at a press conference, Chamberlain directly answered media questions, and he appeared forthright, earnest and well aware of Aurora’s conundrum. He genuinely seemed eager and qualified to address the department’s long-standing issues.
The same city officials who saddled Chamberlain with this unnecessary burden need to focus now on how they can share it.
Come on, stop the hand-wringing and the protests and the meetings and the endless succession of new police chiefs. It is time to just let this very capable police chief do his job. It is time for all citizens to support him.
As much as I am and have been distressed with the actions of the conservatives on the city council, we need to give this man a chance, but you can bet I’ll keep asking questions at Ward meetings. I have family members who are police and know that they are appalled by some police actions. We need to sweep out police who abuse their power just because they can and the city council needs to work with him unlike the previous actions and words of certain council members!
I agree with StrongChildren comment.
At this point, disagreements overpower the appointment.
I look at this as a fresh start from points zero!
Maybe, just maybe this will work.
Or, maybe I have more hope than most.
The sentinel is right though this is the councils own making due to Air quotes “Special Relationships” (Coffman said it last night )Leaving a community that is reeling from a police shooting out is just down right disrespectful. Yes the police chief seems problematic but I could be wrong how would I know since all voices were shut out. If your holding the shovel don’t make the hole bigger, patch it up.
The only way one would know whether this Chief will be decent is to have served with him in the past. In today’s world, most Chiefs are simply smooth talking politicians with little in the way of ethics. It is a national trend that is exemplified by our national leaders. It has become difficult to teach your children virtues like truth, honesty, decency, and integrity while our politicians demonstrate just the opposite and are wildly successful. In a couple years the officers will know if the new Chief is a person of integrity or simply another smooth talker. If he is a person of integrity, he will run afoul of the Sentinel and all of the activists who simply want everything their way. They are still treating Michael Brown, George Floyd and a host of others as martyrs and people to be admired. The facts don’t matter. Officer Chauvin was wrong in what he did. However, the drugs are most likely the cause of Floyd’s death. Floyd was a criminal. Michael Brown had just robbed and assaulted a store owner before he was stopped. He assaulted the officer and was killed. The pistol whipper that Dave Perry refuses to drop was cleared by a jury and there was video that cleared him. Those videos were never shown to the public nor to anyone in the police department except the detective. Dave Perry and his supposed truth seekers have never asked to see the videos nor to determine how a police department could charge their own officers without even obtaining all of the evidence. It is easier to simply distort the facts to advance their radical agenda. The Sentinel is easily as evil as the Republican Party. The Sentinel and the two parties only care about their agendas winning. No matter truth or integrity.
What we know is that the new Chief has his work cut out for him. The Attorney General is, again a politician who used half truths to further his reputation. His assignment of racial bias used cases where no bias appeared other than the fact that the people were black. The City is blessed with an expensive consent decree that seeks to accomplish an impossibility. We can’t acknowledge that fact because America must appear caring and bend over backward to ignore black crime. According to Thomas Sowell, a prominent black economist and researcher, we must all buckle under to the “invincible fallacy” that black crime is a result of institutional racism. The white elites have put forward this idea, just like they put forth that blacks were genetically inferior back in the early 1900’s. Neither is true. What is true is that there is a cultural problem in the black community, primarily with youth. A percentage of the black population is involved with a highly disproportionate amount of crime. Without a cultural shift, that is not likely to change. It is a painful embarrassment to the millions of decent black citizens. Therefore, the idea that Aurora will be able to make their crime stats racially proportionate is ridiculous. So, Dave Perry will have ammunition for the foreseeable future. Boulder and other Colorado communities had more racially disproportionate stats than Aurora. The Attorney General did not go after them. Dave Perry won’t touch these ideas. He is not after the truth nor any real investigative effort. Luckily for him, he never has to answer for anything.
Meanwhile, the Colorado legislature has crippled law enforcement with laws that keep them from doing any proactive or community policing. Thousands of good officers have left. The chief must now try to recruit officers, quickly train them and try to enforce in an environment poisoned by the Sentinel and our legislature. I wish him the best. He has a difficult job and one where he likely will find it impossible to satisfy the Sentinel and a radical portion of our society. After all, Biden and Harris have pushed the institutional racism theme to help themselves. It has to be the truth. Right? Meanwhile, Aurora officers will continue to be forced to shoot black suspects involved in violent crime. That won’t change without a real shift in culture. Get used to it. Even if the officers sit in fire stations and only come out for violent crime, the result will be the same. Scream all you want. It doesn’t change the reality. If it makes you feel better, you can use any pronoun for me that you like. My parents taught me a little saying that served me well in law enforcement and life. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words…”. Can you finish it?
It’s time we had a permanent professional in place. The stream of temporary interims has gone on long enough.