The Aurora Police Department is broken. City officials should appoint Vanessa Wilson as permanent chief to fix it.
The debacles that have plagued the Aurora Police Department over the past few years are merely the symptoms of underlying, structural flaws. Drunken cops, thuggery and homicide are ghastly acts no community should have to endure, repeatedly, from those whose job it is to serve and protect.
But the real problem is an institution that has grown so insular and cynical, that it permits this cavalcade of horror and corruption.
Despite repeated pleas for transparency and accountability, APD has dug in to a siege mentality, creating a para-military fiefdom that is answerable only to itself. The department is beholden to bullying unions that place the interest of officers far above that of the public.
For years, the city’s elected leaders have indifferently watched as cops fired for spewing racist hate-speech and other egregious offenses are put back into the department.
Honorable police officers equally repulsed by all this have had no meaningful way to log complaints that allows the public to understand this is not a department rife with corruption.
Some leaders parrot alarmists who say transparency, oversight and other reforms imposed on the department will force out “good cops.” Any police officer fearing accountability should be removed from the department. Police must be held to higher standards than accountants or construction workers because of the very nature of their work. It comes with the job, and those who find that objectionable must go.
City lawmakers have wrongly backed police leaders who’ve refused to submit to independent review of controversies, saying that civilians are simply incapable of rendering a valid judgment of how police conduct themselves. Or they insist, just as wrongly, that such oversight is unnecessary.
The district attorneys and police have created a symbiotic cloak of law to delay and hide information from the public, all under the pretense of “preserving the integrity of the case.”
The task before Aurora’s next chief of police is Herculean, and we believe Wilson is the right person for the job.
Like many close to the issue, we, too, were hesitant to look for a solution from within a police department where top-level management has been either complicit or responsible for the problems plaguing APD today.
Wilson has made a compelling argument, however, that she’s been fighting these problems from within.
In the few months she’s run the department, she’s acted swiftly and confidently to fire cops who’ve clearly needed to be sacked, checked dubious police procedures and policies and offered credible mea culpa’s that no one in the department has had the courage to do in the past.
Wilson understands the depth of the problems, and she’s quick to point out the one thing above all else that can immediately make a difference inside the department and to all of Aurora. Every officer has a duty to intervene when he or she sees an abuse of police prerogative.
We agree. Above all, peer supervision and empowerment is the key to changing a culture that actively protects malfeasance and corruption.
Despite Wilson’s demonstrated credibility, determination and virtue, she cannot make all the needed changes.
Implementing policies, philosophies and procedures must come from Wilson. But the direction, the scope and the tenor of law enforcement can only come from the community and its elected leaders. Working with Wilson, a new police reform task force and others can create a new and trusted agency that can perform the mission this department has done faithfully and honorably for years: serve and protect — everyone.