Denver’s police chief on Tuesday promised to implement sweeping changes to how his department handles protests in response to a report from the city’s police watchdog that slammed the department’s response to the George Floyd protests earlier this year.
Chief Paul Pazen agreed to 15 of the 16 policy changes the Office of the Independent Monitor recommended in a report released Tuesday morning that criticized the police department’s poor communication, revealed its nonexistent record keeping and noted several examples of officers using excessive force against peaceful protesters.
“I do take accountability and responsibility for our department’s actions,” Pazen said during a Tuesday afternoon new conference. “We will use this report to improve.”
The independent monitor’s investigation found that Denver police failed to record body camera footage during the protests, failed to adequately track uses of force, failed to communicate effectively internally and failed to display identification. These failures not only made it difficult for police leaders to track the effectiveness of their efforts and make adjustments during the protests, but also made it extremely difficult to evaluate the department after the fact and investigate allegations of officers’ wrongdoing, the report found.
Pazen repeatedly blamed the mistakes on the unplanned nature of the protests and their enormous scale and said the department did not have time to prepare, even though the protests lasted several days. He said officers did not complete use-of-force reports in a timely manner because they were exhausted after 12- to 14-hour shifts. He said many officers’ riot gear made it difficult for them to affix body cameras and identification.
“The word unprecedented has been overused in 2020,” Pazen said. “It is underused when talking about the challenges we faced.”
The independent monitor’s recommendations are wide-ranging — from creating a system to track the use of less-lethal weapons to participating in joint crowd-control trainings with other law enforcement agencies in the Denver area. Some are more basic, like requiring the department to keep track of which officers are responding to a demonstration, which the department did not do during the George Floyd protests.
“Validated our experiences”
The main findings of the report resonated with what protesters saw during five tumultuous days of protests between May 28 and June 1.
“As a community member and a community organizer, I think it validated our experiences,” said Apryl Alexander, an organizer with Black Lives Matter 5280 and a member of Denver’s Citizen Oversight Board who attended protests. “We saw what was happening downtown with the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons.”
The report’s findings were also no surprise to organizers at the Colorado branch of the National Lawyers Guild, which had legal observers at the protests watching how police interacted with people. The observers’ notes provided a good overview of tactics and problems, said Jes Jones, an organizer with the Colorado chapter and a criminal defense attorney.
“That excessive force was apparent from every story,” Jones said. “There were protesters who described themselves as being hunted by police, as being corralled by police. The stories were consistent and egregious.”
No officers have been disciplined in connection with the protests besides an officer Pazen fired for a social media post. More than 50 internal affairs investigations are ongoing, Pazen said. At least 56 internal investigations have been closed, according to the independent monitor’s report, including 20 that were closed in part because the offending officer could not be identified.
Tim Lomas, 58, still has an internal affairs case open after he was injured by police May 30. Lomas had been peacefully protesting for about 30 minutes when an officer sprayed him in the face with pepper spray without warning. Video that Lomas recorded shows the officer was off to his right when the officer sprayed him in the face, which burned his skin for at least a day.
Lomas reported the incident to Denver police internal affairs on June 2 but has not heard whether the officer has even been identified. An email chain he shared with The Denver Post showed he had to follow up repeatedly with internal affairs investigators about his case, which has been reassigned at least once.
“There’s really been no information, nobody has really been forthcoming,” he said.
Identifying a specific officer has also been a problem for Jax Feldmann, who was a bystander when a Denver police officer shot him in the eye with a less-lethal round. Denver prosecutors told Feldmann that they could not prosecute the officer who shot him, permanently blinding him in one eye, because that specific officer could not be identified, said Birk Baumgartner, who is representing both Feldmann and Lomas.
“For the Denver police, this was not about crowd control, this was about retaliation against protesters,” said Baumgartner, who has been working on a lawsuit against the department in connection to the protests.
The independent monitor’s report recommended that the department:
- Track the use of less-lethal munitions, like pepper ball and tear gas
- Create lists of which officers respond to a demonstration
- Require all officers responding to a protest to wear and use body cameras
- Require officers to issue complete dispersal orders before using less-lethal weapons and that those orders are recorded
- Enforce rules that officers must display their name and badge number during crowd-control events
- Ban the use of rubber pellet grenades during crowd-control situations
- Create rules for when officers can use flash-bang grenades and creating stricter standards for when they can use pepper-ball guns
- Require officers to promptly write detailed use-of-force reports
- Create written mutual aid agreements with other law enforcement agencies and participate in joint training
Pazen said the department would post all of the independent monitor’s recommendations to its website and would indicate whether the change has been made or provide a timeline for when the change would happen.
The only recommendation Pazen did not fully agree with was that officers from other agencies must comply with Denver’s use-of-force standards and are limited to weapons approved by the city.
Changes insufficient for some
But these changes aren’t enough, Jones and others said.
“The idea that body cameras and transparency is going to solve the over-policing and excessive force against our minority communities is just not true,” she said, noting the many police officers chose to not use body cameras during the protests.
City Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca called for the police department’s budget to be reduced in response to the report.
“When we are transforming an inherently racist and persistently violent institution, no option should be off the table — including changes in leadership and immediately redirecting a portion of the DPD budget to repairing the harm and rebuilding the public’s trust,” she said in a statement.
Alexandra Barbour, a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado who was injured by police while protested on May 31, said the report shows that Denver’s accountability systems are broken.
“Based on my experience it really felt like my right to be protesting was not being respected, as an individual and part of the group,” she said. “It felt like they were trying by any means necessary to end the protests, to make them stop.”