The Aurora police department’s greatest impediment to restoring badly needed public trust is a consistent and pervasive lack of transparency and candor as officers carry out duties, and too often become the center of some crisis.
The grand jury indictment this week of Aurora police officer Matthew Neely on murder charges in connection with the 2025 fatal shooting death of Rajon Belt-Stubblefield during a traffic stop exemplifies the ongoing problem at APD.
Aside from the fact that, clearly, officers have not all been successfully trained to avoid shooting and killing people of color they encounter in their duties, the department continues to cloud the public’s understanding of such shootings as they unravel.
This is a police department still under a state-mandate to fix problems that led to the determination that it has shown “patterns and practices” of using excessive force, especially on people of color.
This is a police department responsible for the grisly death of Elijah McClain. This is a department that clearly failed to successfully arrest Kilyn Lewis during a formulated encounter, and instead, fatally shot him because an officer mistook Lewis’ cell phone for a gun.
Aurora has paid out tens of millions of dollars in court settlements to families of Black people wrongly maimed or killed during interactions with Aurora officers. The burden continues to rest with the Aurora police department to prove to the public that all of its officers are capable of handling the difficult job of police work without regularly killing Black people during the course of duty.
It has yet to do that.
Instead, just days after Belt-Stubblefield was fatally shot, as he clearly harassed Neely during an encounter watched by numerous witnesses as it unfolded, Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain defended Neely, saying that choices made by Belt-Stubblefield led to his shooting death.
In essence, Chamberlain told the public, he had it coming.
Clearly, an Arapahoe County grand jury, having seen all the evidence, disagreed.
Jurors agreed that, despite claims by Neely and APD, Belt-Stubblefield did not threaten Neely.
Within hours after the shooting, Chamberlain called a press conference to dispense details of the shooting, and much more.
“We are not going to hold back anything,” Chamberlain told reporters last September. “I ask the community to please realize we are going to provide real and factual information, and I ask for their support in this process.”
Immediately, Chamberlain held back the identity of the officer involved in the shooting. Sentinel sources unofficially identified Neely as a veteran cop who had previously been the subject of police, court and Sentinel investigations questioning his veracity and behavior.
While Chamberlain did provide some clear and factual details about the shooting, much of what he provided was conjecture.
Chamberlain repeatedly insisted his assumptions and conjecture were “facts” even before any real “facts” were gleaned and examined by an outside agency that is not under investigation for wrongly killing Black people it encounters.
Shooting-incident video made public by bystanders reveals what appears to be a heated argument between Belt-Stubblefield and the officer. At one point, the officer takes a swing at the man, hitting him in the face with the punch.
Chamberlain said the punch was the officer’s attempt to “de-escalate” what he described as a stand-off.
Police training experts say that officers are, indeed, trained to punch people in the face, but not as a “de-escalation” technique, rather as a critical maneuver to prevent a catastrophic event.
The misinformation turned out by APD during these crises undermines real efforts to restore good policing and credibility to the department.
The bottom line is that some of the people killed by Aurora police behaved wrongly and sometimes even criminally.
Clearly, neither the department nor the city’s elected officials and management has the will or power to make this self-destructive behavior stop. It not only undermines the city and department, it detracts from the credibility of the vast majority of Aurora police officers, who professionally and compassionately serve the community.
State lawmakers should step in and create a statewide regulation and system that prevents Aurora, and all police and sheriff departments in the state, from being the public face of officer-involved deaths. Currently, the state provides for Critical Incident Response Teams to, partially, independently investigate deaths caused by police. The Legislature should modify that system to ensure that an outside agency, such as the state attorney general’s office, acts as public spokesperson after these incidents and ensures the media and public get frank, accurate and timely answers to questions.
Aurora police must accept the reality that when an officer in Aurora, or anywhere, kills someone, the officer, and in Aurora’s case, the department, are suspects and parties to a potential crime.
While they, too, deserve the benefit of the doubt and rights to proper adjudications, they are in no way immune to the rule of law.
