The problem Aurora can’t get past was made clear this week with controversy created in trying to adopt a policy dictating how city lawmakers should behave when they have to confront the public after news of an officer-involved shooting.
One side of the city council scowlingly insists that offering condolences to friends and family members of someone killed by an Aurora police officer during some kind of interaction with police sends the wrong message and is essentially “anti-police.”
The other side of the city council grimacingly insists that elected leaders have a duty to show sympathy and remorse for the tragic loss of life and explain the legal constraints about what they can and can’t do about it.
Resolving those differences isn’t the problem. The shootings are the problem.
Four years after the state government investigated Aurora police and determined the city has a problem because the department has for years exhibited patterns and practices of using excessive force, especially against people of color, Aurora still suffers from the same serious problem.
For almost two years — long after details of the death of Elijah McClain at the hands of Aurora police and rescuers revealed how serious the situation was — activists and family and friends of Kilyn Lewis have bi-weekly made loud, insistent appearances at city council meetings, making demands of things the city can and cannot do.
The nearly two-year public battle has keenly illustrated the very crux of Aurora’s problem, and how city lawmakers during the past four years were mostly to blame for the seemingly endless animosity between lawmakers and protesters.
Even though the political makeup and majority of the city council changed after the Nov. 4 Election, there are still a handful of city lawmakers who believe that the last six or so Aurora police shootings were warranted, or “justified.”
They absolutely were not.
It doesn’t mean that the officer who shot Kilyn Lewis or others acted outside the law when they fatally shot men while confronting them and trying to arrest them. It means that Aurora police too often finds itself in situations where police officers feel like they have no option but to fire guns at suspects.
Police experts across the nation have made clear to the Sentinel during years of stories and investigations that poor training, poor planning and poor execution are mostly to blame for putting police in situations where a lethal shot is the only solution to their law enforcement problem.
In the case of Lewis, an entire SWAT unit surveilled their suspect with Denver Police for days before orchestrating and moving in for his arrest. He was confronted outside of his car in an apartment parking lot during a surprise encounter with a cell phone raised over his head, mistaken to be a gun by one officer, who fatally shot Lewis.
Lewis was being sought by Denver police in connection with the shooting of a homeless man.
Similarly, Rajon Belt-Stubblefield was shot and killed during his arrest after a car crash he caused. When approached by a police officer, he became confrontational with the officer and when the situation escalated, the officer pulled his gun and fatally shot him.
In the case of the shooting death of Rashaud Johnson at an airport parking lot in 2025, police didn’t respond for hours to requests from employees to investigate a man wandering around the cars, who clearly was having a mental crisis. After a lengthy confrontation, the single officer sent to the call fired on Johnson and killed him.
An easy legal argument can be made to shield the officers in each of these cases from criminal prosecution. But the longstanding argument about Aurora police making lethal mistakes in answering calls and encountering people, especially Black men, is undeniable.
While each of these slain men may have deserved to be held accountable for whatever they were accused of, their crimes, misdeeds or psychiatric problems did not warrant the death penalty. Under the very constraints of the Constitution and our legal system, police are not allowed to impose it — under any circumstances.
The Aurora City Council resolution codifying how lawmakers should respond to future officer-involved shootings appears to offer clarity and comfort — more to city officials than to those linked to the shootings themselves.
There is no harm in the clarity, transparency and humanity linked to this measure, but as critics have pointed out, this does nothing to solve a problem that Aurora has made progress in addressing, but has not yet overcome.
Just over a month ago, Aurora police fatally shot a Black man having a mental crisis, long after it became absolutely clear the man had previously suffered from serious mental problems and was in the midst of a crisis and armed with a knife. Somehow, and the public has not been informed, an officer and police dog were situated so that the suspect was able to quickly reach the officer, attack him with a knife and stab him in the head.
Police fatally shot the man.
Police inside the department, reaching out to the Sentinel, have questioned how the intervention played out and why the relatively slow-moving developments in the call led to an unprotected officer in such a vulnerable situation.
These same questions keep arising nearly each time Aurora police fatally shoot someone they encounter.
Aurora Councilmember Stephanie Hancock, who voted against the condolence measure, on Monday coldly told critics in the audience, including the mother of Lewis, that she opposed the proposition because it’s just never enough for the families and activists of those killed by police. “When is it going to be enough?” Hancock remarked.
The answer is clear. When a truly independent, non-political, oversight mechanism can enforce laws, rules and regulations that provide accountability of the Aurora police department, that will be enough.
The police cannot police themselves. And the local district attorney, who by law can only determine if an officer broke a law during a shooting, cannot determine if a police-involved shooting was truly “justified.”
While some city lawmakers may be weary of this issue, it’s critical that the majority of city council members finish the job spelled out in the consent decree and reform this police department so that officers can enforce and uphold the laws, serve the public, and not the politics of the city council dais.
