Few US police departments have seen as catastrophic a loss of public confidence as has the Aurora Police Department over the past 10 years.
The list of starkly racist, incompetent episodes, or schemes to keep the malfeasance quiet, has dogged the department. And the blunders have impugned the hundreds of honest, talented and caring police officers on the force, unfairly sullied.
Aurora’s documented and even adjudicated calamities have, however, resulted in powerful and long-overdue changes in state law — and local policy.
Last week, Aurora police quietly released a police-produced, video review of a May 4 fatal shooting by APD officers of a man suspected of shooting someone else, just minutes before a police confrontation.
The video was a sober assessment of the shooting, narrated by interim Police Chief Heather Morris.
Morris reads from a script, briefly outlining what led to the shooting. She refers to a chaotic series of events, depicted in the officer body-cam video.
She tells viewers that the video protocol is novel for Aurora, and that it’s an important step toward providing much-needed information about violent police encounters with the public.
“The goal is to increase our agency’s transparency and accountability,” police said in a statement, and Morris reiterated in the video. “These videos are intended to provide our community with a better understanding of what occurred based on the information we have at the time of their release.”
The staid assessment is a far departure from previous, often hastily called, press conferences where the chief or an appointee would relay select facts about the incident.
On more than one occasion — tragically, officer-involved shootings are not a rarity in Aurora — police officials have awkwardly, or falsely, misled the public by leaving critical information out or offering circumstantial details to TV cameras and reporters to make their case about the shooting, rather than just make a statement about the facts.
A recent example of the danger there was made by former interim Chief Art Acevedo. A year ago, an Aurora police officer shot and killed 14-year-old Jor’Dell Richardson as the boy ran from the officer after the boy apparently robbed a convenience store. Acevedo held a press conference shortly after.
There, he said the boy had a handgun and may have reached for it as he was wrestled to the ground and arrested.
Days later, the chief backtracked, saying the weapon was actually a pellet gun, not a firearm.
The issue wasn’t that an officer, in a chaotic moment of arrest, should be able to tell the difference, the problem was Acevedo waited several days before making the distinction public, casting doubt on the credibility of an already oft-doubted police department.
Last week’s thoughtful video review and brief assessment of the May 4 shooting is a promising departure from past policies and egregious mistakes.
The film begins with a cut from a 911 tape. The shooting victim can be heard yelling out as he is shot in the leg, telling dispatchers breathlessly that he was hiding from the shooter.
Multiple police rush to the complex of row-style apartments just before dusk. While officers were talking with the shooting victim, several neighbors began running and yelling that the suspect had returned to the scene.
Two officers round the corner of a long row of front doors, and the video shows what appears to be a man at a front door of one of the homes farthest from the officers. Police yell, telling the suspect to show his hands. The suspect appears to turn to run from the officers, and several gunshots can be heard, and the suspect drops to the ground.
The video raises many questions. And it is by no means an investigative assessment justifying or criticizing how police conducted themselves and whether the fatal shooting was warranted.
But the review offers a clear and credible assessment of what led to the shooting and how it occurred. The video and APD’s motivation to provide details on tragedies like this are commendable.
We, and much of the public, are anxious to see a similar video explain how an orchestrated May 23 SWAT unit arrest with Denver resulted in the fatal shooting of Kilyn Lewis. Separate from other investigations, this provides novel transparency from APD.
These videos would even more powerfully establish Aurora police credibility if an independent entity — outside of the police department, but empowered by the city — were to review these productions. An independent should be able to authenticate to the public that they are, for the most part, accurate assessments.
In addition, the videos should be released at or before offering a press conference, allowing the media to clarify unanswered questions.
For now, the public should laud the police effort and encourage further ways to make controversial police events transparent.
Ironically, this new transparency comes after I lodged an internal affairs complaint against Detective Ethan Snow and Division Chief Chris Juul who were complicit in the wrongful prosecution and distorted Use of Force Review of an arrest almost three years ago. That arrest involved the dramatic pistol whipping of Kyle Vinson. Chief Vanessa Wilson immediately gave a press conference and released the body cam videos that showed only a small part of the arrest. The officers were charged and publicly condemned before the other business videos were even picked up. Those videos showed Vinson, trying to take the officer’s gun. Under state law, those videos were required to be released to the public within 21 days of the complaint on the officers. The videos were never released and as a result, Officer Martinez was convicted of failure to intervene. I found the videos buried in the discovery material and enlarged them as any competent detective would have done. Further, those videos would have been reviewed before charging the officers or before any Use of Force decision was made. They were not. When the business videos were shown in the trial of Officer Haubert, he was found not guilty of all charges. That did not erase almost three years of fear of prison, public ridicule, family embarrassment, and financial loss. There is some merit to an independent review of videos if the department cannot be trusted to have the integrity to release all video. In a case where it affected the lives of two of their own officers, you would expect that a greater attempt at transparency and fairness would have been made. In this case, Chief Wilson looked like a reformer by going after her own officers. That would have been fine, if she had looked at all of the evidence. She did not. Further, her Division Chief, Chris Juul did not bother to look at the videos before issuing a Use of Force Review that was full of untrue and misleading statements. Body cam videos do not show all of the action or what the officers see. It its imperative that all video be examined before judgments are made. One can only hope that we see more integrity from the APD in the future. This is always questionable because Chiefs are essentially political animals.