Colorado’s attorney general will require the Aurora Police Department to make sweeping reforms after a year-long investigation found officers’ pattern of racially biased policing and use of excessive force routinely violated state and federal law.
The department’s officers persistently arrested and injured Black individuals and other people of color at higher rates than white residents, according to the investigation released Wednesday.
Officers also routinely used excessive force against people unnecessarily, failed to de-escalate encounters and failed to properly document information about individuals they stopped as required by state law, the investigation found.
The department’s training and accountability structures are inadequate and create a culture of violence, according to investigators’ 112-page report.
“We observed statistically significant racial disparities — especially with respect to Black individuals — in nearly every important type of police contact with the community, from interactions to arrests to uses of force,” the report states. “These disparities persisted across income, gender and geographic boundaries. Together with the other information we reviewed, we find that Aurora Police engages in racially biased policing, treating people of color (and Black people in particular) differently from their white counterparts.”
Attorney General Phil Weiser will seek to create a legally binding agreement, known as a consent decree, with the Aurora Police Department that will outline the steps his office believes necessary to fix the problems investigators discovered. State law gives the attorney general’s office and city administrators 60 days to come to an agreement.
“If this effort is unsuccessful, we will seek a court-imposed order correcting these problems,” the report states.
The exact terms of the consent decree have not been written, but Weiser said they will require the city to hire an independent monitor, overhaul its training and use-of-force policies and seek reform to the city’s Civil Service Commission, which hires new officers and has final say on discipline.
The investigation is the first under a new law passed in the summer of 2020 as large-scale protests against police brutality and racism continued across Colorado following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. The bill, SB-217, gave Weiser’s office the authority to conduct such an investigation and, if agencies didn’t make the required changes, to force them to do so via civil litigation.
Weiser said at a Wednesday news conference that the patterns and practice investigation his office conducted into Aurora’s department is one of the first such probes in the United States conducted by a state agency. The U.S. Department of Justice for years has conducted similar investigations and implemented consent decrees.
“This should be a lesson to other agencies that they need to put policies in place that protect their communities or they will be investigated,” said Rep. Leslie Herod, the Denver Democrat who sponsored SB-217.
Weiser chose the Aurora Police Department as the first agency to be investigated following a series of high-profile allegations of police misconduct, including the death of Elijah McClain at the hands of Aurora police and paramedics in 2019.
McClain’s mother, Sheneen McClain, helped pass SB-217 and said the report “confirms what many Aurora residents already know — Aurora’s police department has a long-standing culture of violence and bias.”
The attorney general’s investigative team also found that Aurora Fire Rescue had a pattern and practice of illegally injecting people with ketamine. On multiple occasions, Aurora paramedics gave people doses of the sedative that were too large for their body weight and failed to properly monitor them after administering the drug. The department stopped using ketamine in September 2020 as multiple investigations into its use of the drug on McClain continued and does not have any plans to resume its use.
“There are changes to be made”
Aurora City Manager Jim Twombly, Aurora police Chief Vanessa Wilson and Aurora Fire Rescue Chief Fernando Gray all committed to work with Weiser’s office to implement change. All three pointed to reform efforts that have been underway for the past year.
“Today is incredibly difficult for not only the Aurora community but this agency,” Wilson said in a statement. “We acknowledge there are changes to be made. We will not broad-brush this agency or discount the professionalism and integrity that individual officers bring to our community every day.”
Over 14 months, the attorney general’s investigators conducted data analysis, spent 220 hours on ride-alongs with Aurora police and firefighters, attended dozens of police meetings, and reviewed body camera footage. The investigators read more than 2,800 reports, spoke with Aurora residents and interviewed employees of the two agencies.
Investigators attributed the failings of the Aurora Police Department to “systemic and severe culture problems,” according to the report.
“Aurora does not create and oversee appropriate expectations for responsible behavior, which leads to the use of excessive force and the violation of the civil rights of its residents,” a news release from Weiser’s office states.
For example, investigators saw officers tackle people to the ground without giving the people a chance to comply with orders, Weiser said. They also saw officers repeatedly issue a generic command to “stop resisting” to people under arrest, even though the person under arrest did not appear to resist. Officers often responded to a scene with a disproportionate “show of force mentality” that involves many officers drawing guns and threatening force.
Investigators also saw incidents where officers used pepper spray on a sleeping person in a stolen car and shot a drunk person with less-lethal shotgun rounds at close range because the person wasn’t complying with commands. The person didn’t understand English.
Not only did police department data show that people of color — especially Black individuals — were more likely to be arrested and hurt by Aurora police, investigators also “personally observed differences in how Aurora Police officers engaged with the community on our ride-alongs based on the race of the subject,” the report states.
Investigators suggested tracking the court outcomes of misdemeanor cases to better ascertain whether specific officers are making correct arrest decisions. If prosecutors decline to charge an arrestee or later drop charges, it’s likely that arrest was unconstitutional in the first place.
“Aurora Police generally approaches the use of force with a what-can-be-justified-under-the-outer-limits-of-the-law approach rather than a what-force-is-necessary approach,” the report states.
The investigators’ other findings include:
- The police department, which is 80% white, fails to employ staff that mirror Aurora’s makeup and the Civil Service Commission disproportionately fails Black and Latino applicants during the hiring process
- Officers routinely failed to de-escalate non-urgent situations and instead aggressively confronted people, including those accused of no crime
- Officers have a fundamentally incorrect understanding of de-escalation that is focused on calming down after force is used instead of preventing the need for force in the first place
Investigators found significant flaws in the attitude and operations of the internal Force Review Board. The board routinely focused on trying to justify a use of force instead of deciding whether it was appropriate or exploring the officers’ rationale.
For example, in a Force Review Board meeting about a high-profile case where an officer pistol-whipped and choked a man who was not resisting arrest, many members of the board said that the pistol-whipping was not outside of policy and spent a significant amount of time trying to justify the force, the report states. The presentation on the incident described the pistol-whipping in euphemisms like “jabbing the resident in the face a couple of times with the barrel of his weapon” and failed to state that the officer choked the man, the attorney general’s report states.
The officer was later charged with three felonies in connection to the incident and resigned.
Further, if the board did identify poor tactics that did not qualify as a policy violation, the department often failed to disseminate instruction or guidance to officers and supervisors on how similar bad tactics can be avoided in the future.
“A corrupt system”
Sheneen McClain called on Aurora to enter into the consent decree and for Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman to resign and for other men involved in her son’s death to face consequences, like the police chief at the time and the district attorney who chose to not file charges against the officers who detained her son.
Her attorney, Qusair Mohamedbhai, said that it’s painful that the government fails to be proactive on issues of police brutality and instead often only implements change after tragedy.
“The whole system’s corrupt,” McClain said. “It’s not a few bad apples, it’s the whole system. There might be a few good apples, but they’re in a corrupt system.”
The Aurora Police Department was at the top of civil rights attorney Mari Newman‘s mind while she helped write and lobby SB-217. But Newman, who has litigated several police brutality lawsuits against the department and is representing Elijah McClain’s father, said Aurora is not the only problematic department in the state.
“This is hardly unique to Aurora,” she said.
Weiser said Wednesday that his office is not currently investigating any other Colorado law enforcement agencies, though Herod said Coloradans have reported concerns about other departments to his office.
Changes to Aurora police will not come immediately, Weiser said. Consent decrees often last for years, Weiser said. Failure to comply with the agreement’s terms could mean an injunction by a judge or fines.
“This is going to take time,” he said.
