Rightfully, much of Aurora has lost patience with the police department and its inability to stop fatally shooting Black people.
As absurd as that sounds, it’s an undeniable and wholly preventable truth.
Aurora police and city lawmakers, again, have been the recent target of intense and justifiable public vitriol after Aurora SWAT Officer Michael Dieck shot and killed Kilyn Lewis May 23 as a SWAT unit tried to arrest the 37-year-old Denver man in an Aurora condo parking lot.
For more than an hour Monday, Aurora City Council members were subjected to a barrage of accusations, innuendo and castigation by Lewis’ family members and a variety of local residents and activists.
Borne out of frustration by a police department that just can’t prevent the abuse and wrongful death of Black men and boys at the hands of officers, family members and others demand city lawmakers fire Dieck and press for criminal murder charges in the shooting death.
That can’t and shouldn’t happen.
City lawmakers make policy. They are expressly, and rightfully, forbidden from handling city and police personnel issues. City legislators and, especially, police cannot “charge” anyone with any type of crime.
That’s solely the responsibility of criminal prosecutors and the courts.
Officer Dieck deserves and is entitled to due process, which the man he shot to death wasn’t afforded.
Only a thorough and qualified investigation, outside of the Aurora police department, and scrutiny of that investigation will reveal whether criminal charges against Dieck are winnable, or even warranted.
Despite what investigators from the 18th Judicial District may conclude, questions and concerns raised by the information released so far are compelling in the case.
First, Aurora Police should discontinue creating their curated, narrated videos of officer-involved shootings. Despite the best intentions of offering transparency to the community, the dearth of community trust in the police department only makes these productions inflammatory. Police should release complete and unedited video to the public and allow the media to ask questions of police officials for details.
As for the Lewis shooting, offering the public a look at how the shooting occurred without the ability to clarify what they saw further undermines trust in police.
Everyone has the same questions:
Why did Dieck alone fire at Lewis if four other officers saw the same thing at the same time in real time?
Why would Dieck fire at Lewis after he raised his arms, with his cell phone clearly in view, and not as he was pulling an “unknown” object from his pocket or as he raised it?
But the most compelling question has to do with why this botched arrest ever occurred.
Lewis is accused of inadvertently shooting a bystander in Denver in early May. Denver Police reports indicate Lewis was embroiled in some kind of dispute at a Denver liquor store and fired a gun from his car, allegedly aiming for someone involved in the dispute. Instead, a round struck a man, who suffers from low vision, in the shoulder, injuring him.
Denver police say they were able to identify Lewis as a shooting suspect from witness testimony and videotape.
Aurora police have not detailed how they became involved in the case and the search for Lewis, but they did say that the Aurora SWAT unit conducted extensive surveillance of Lewis, determining he would be at a local condo parking lot.
This is exactly what the SWAT unit is created for and trained to do, subdue and arrest subjects, even under extreme and difficult situations. While dynamics of patrol officers in squad cars rolling up hot to chaotic crime scenes make officer-involved shootings understandable in some situations, the fatal shooting of Lewis by an 8-year-veteran of the SWAT team at a wide open scene totally under police control is anathema to the role of SWAT units.
Instead, Dieck appears to have been “trigger happy” or unable to discern a real-as-opposed-to-perceived threat during the arrest.
Only a valid and detailed investigation will reveal what went wrong during the operation, but police should step up and make clear, SWAT units are trained to prevent what happened to Lewis during arrests.
We agree with many police critics who push back at those insisting that Lewis was to blame for his own death at the hands of police. Police are not courts, nor are they executioners.
While the city is in no position to criticize nor defend Dieck and other officers, they must assure the public that they can trust the department to accurately assess the problem and offer a workable, verifiable solution. In the thick of state-mandated police reform, that’s seriously in doubt.
As for restoring credibility in the department and its operations, only a truly independent oversight position or committee can do that. Nothing else is a substitute.
Sorry Dave but the officer’s actions were wholly justified as the video clearly shows. Upon hearing the command to get on the ground, he simply doesn’t. Instead, he reaches into his back pocket and produces something black — like a handgun.
In that split second, the officer’s training together with his wholly justified right to defend himself in a extremely high-risk situation led to the decision to fire. No, in the full light of day, it wasn’t a gun. It was a flash of something black pulled from the back pocket when the order was to get on the ground. The officer’s assumption in that split second that is was likely a gun being pulled was both wholly reasonable and wrong.
Asking the officer to stop and be 100% sure before firing puts the officer in unreasonable danger and the job is already dangerous enough. If both hands aren’t being raised in plain sight, the order to get on the ground isn’t being obeyed, and instead one hand goes to a back pocket retrieving something black , its reasonable to assume the worst and take immediate defensive action.
I’m confident the investigators, the DA and any jury would 100% agree.
APD: “Shoot first. Ask questions later.”
SWAT: Shoot Without Any Thought
I hate the way you downplay the criminal shooting an innocent bystander
I’ve been a vocal critic of the police brutality in Aurora, but this is different. I’m a person capable of rational thought. It wasn’t my family member, and I understand that the family is grieving and wanting to blame somebody. But their loved one wasn’t a good guy, or a smart one. If you do something stupid, like Kilyn unfortunately did, and there are consequences, it’s your fault. Nobody else’s. And what Kilyn did–attempting to MURDER somebody from his car window, which makes him a dangerous threat to everyone, including the SWAT members, and then reaching into his pocket with the SWAT team guns aimed at him instead of putting his empty hands in the air–makes this 100% Kilyn’s fault. Come on, People! Why did he need his cell phone at that moment? Was he going to post a Tik Tok video? What a dumb move!! The officer had half a second to make a decision, not several seconds. And any reasonable person would expect a guy who was wanted for a drive-by shooting to be a loose cannon with zero regard for anyone’s life but his own. That’s the guy some of you are defending. Choose your battles more wisely. You’re doing a disservice to all of the INNOCENT victims of police brutality with this nonsense and you’re hurting your cause when you fall behind EVERY person of color who gets shot by police. Not everybody deserves the attention or support. What you’re supporting now is a lack of accountability and that leads to more of these shootings. Kilyn’s not alive to take accountability, but his family and supporters are. It’s easy to blame somebody else and I’m sure lawyers are knocking on the family’s door but the taxpayers of Aurora don’t deserve to have to fork out a settlement in this case. Lack of accountability is a pandemic in this country. This happened just the way it’s supposed to: A bad guy who shoots at people and threatens the police when he gets caught gets shot.
The police have a duty to protect the public, including themselves. They have zero duty to protect a criminal. I’m glad Kilyn’s no longer on the street putting us all at risk of bodily harm. He didn’t demonstrate by his criminal record that he gave a crap about any of us. He doesn’t deserve anyone’s mercy now.
Well said!
It is difficult for the average person to understand that often criminals do irrational things when police officers try to stop them. I have seen a number of people killed through the years when they did something really stupid when an officer had pointed their gun at the person. Often criminals know that officers will hesitate to shoot and they take advantage of that fact. In today’s world, it is expected that a criminal will be excused for any resistance or failure to obey commands. The officer is expected to be courageously ignorant of the danger to his or her life. In a high risk arrest, there is little room for hesitation. An officer has to deal with this type of encounter a number of times during his/her career in a large city. Each officer at the scene has a slightly different view of the scene, slightly different perception of the danger, and slightly different ability to shoot. A grand jury will probably be empowered to decide this issue since prosecutors these days often are political animals who will not make decisions that are difficult or controversial. I understand why the officer shot. I won’t comment on the training and supervision issues involved.
Wow finally an article that allows comments, and what do you see? You see rational human beings recognizing that not all police shootings are unjustified, and that in most cases, they are.
Also, you see that these articles, with their focus on color, feel the need to emphasize the race of those who are killed.
Very sad state our news media is in.