Two Front Range cities are eyeing more oversight for their police departments.
Lakewood’s City Council voted last week to “work toward the establishment” of an independent civilian oversight board for the city’s police department. And in Aurora, the city set aside about $330,000 this year to fund an Office of Police Accountability — even as city officials say they are still considering how oversight should be structured.
The creation of an independent oversight board in Lakewood would put the city into the company of just a handful of Front Range cities with such boards, including Denver and Boulder. The push for more oversight came to a head in Lakewood after the death of Jax Gratton, a 34-year-old transgender woman who disappeared in April and was found dead in June.
Lakewood police faced criticism for their handling of the case, including for announcing Gratton’s death by using her deadname and, later, for a lack of transparency about the investigation. Gratton’s case spurred the move toward an oversight committee, but the push is also rooted in wider issues around trust between police and community, Lakewood Councilwoman Isabel Cruz said.
“Although this specific incident really brought this to the fore, and the demands of community activists really pushed us, it is rooted in a lot of different conversations,” she said.
City Council members overwhelmingly voted Jan. 26 to create a 12-month committee to work toward the creation of a permanent oversight board. The temporary committee will have access to police records, completed internal affairs investigations and body-worn camera footage, and will be able to review complaints submitted to the police department.
At the end of the 12-month period, the committee will report to the City Council about how a permanent police oversight committee would be staffed and structured, among other recommendations.
Council members will then have the power to move forward with the permanent board or end the oversight effort.
Lakewood Police Department spokesman John Romero declined to comment on the push for oversight. About three dozen police officers packed last week’s council meeting, where Lakewood police Agent Quinn Pratt-Cordova, an executive board member of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 21, spoke against independent oversight.
An oversight board would be redundant, he said, and could damage officers’ trust in the city. Such oversight might “deter top talent,” from the police department, Pratt-Cordova said.
“Civilian oversight boards are rare and often follow severe systemic issues like those in other cities, issues that the majority of you don’t agree exist in the local police department,” Pratt-Cordova told council members. “The unnecessary creation of an oversight board attempts to apply an unwarranted national narrative to Lakewood PD.”
Lakewood Mayor Wendi Strom said she hopes any permanent effort will be aimed at improving police-community relations in ways that go beyond traditional independent oversight.
“The oversight word, I think, it is a big sticking point and one that — especially for folks within the public safety realm — has a very specific meaning,” she said in an interview. “So what we end up with, it is hard to tell. But for me, and I think City Council has been pretty clear on this in multiple conversations over the last month, the end goal is ultimately to help our community members feel more comfortable reaching out when there is a need.”
In Denver, city officials created a citizen oversight board in 2004 after a Denver police officer shot and killed Paul Childs, a developmentally disabled 15-year-old boy. Boulder’s citizen oversight panel — which recently saw its reach curtailed — followed a 2019 incident in which an officer pulled a gun on a Black student who was picking up trash outside his home.
In Aurora, the police department entered into a consent decree — court-ordered reforms overseen by an independent monitor — after the 2019 killing of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who died after Aurora police officers violently restrained him and paramedics injected him with a too-large dose of a powerful sedative.
McClain’s death was part of a pattern of racial bias and excessive force within the Aurora Police Department, state officials later found.
Aurora City Manager Jason Batchelor hopes the city’s two-person Office of Police Accountability will serve as an independent monitor for the police department when police exit the consent decree and are no longer under the supervision of the court-ordered monitor. The creation of such a position is a requirement of the consent decree.
The new office would report to the city manager, Batchelor said, but would be created with built-in protections aimed at ensuring its independence, including putting into city ordinance the office’s right to have free and unfettered access to information and budgetary safeguards to ensure it could not be defunded by the city manager. The protections would mirror Aurora’s approach to its internal auditor, which operates independently and would work in tandem with the new office, Batchelor said.
“I don’t get to tell the internal auditor, ‘That might make me look bad, don’t publish that,'” Batchelor said. “That can’t happen.”
The Office of Police Accountability, which Batchelor hopes to be ready to hire for in a few months, would have “contemporaneous oversight” of any city investigation, he said. The office would not oversee police discipline and would not conduct its own investigations into police misconduct. Instead, the employees would be able to flag problems or concerns about such investigations to Batchelor, the City Council or to the public.
Aurora Councilwoman Amy Wiles, who has helped to organize community meetings to discuss police oversight as recently as this week, said residents need a neutral place to report police misconduct.
“Right now, if you want to report something — you had a poor interaction with a police officer or you feel something wasn’t right — to call and report that is a bit invasive. You have to call the police department,” she said. “…So we are hoping this provides that level of security to community to say, ‘Hey if something went wrong, here is this neutral person you can reach out to.'”
The Office of Police Accountability could receive complaints of police misconduct directly from the public, Batchelor said, and then would “partner with the (police) department to make sure that any complaints are fully investigated.”
That approach concerns Omar Montgomery, Rocky Mountain state conference president for the NAACP.
“If you are going to have true transparency and true accountability, it can’t be that organization doing the investigation,” he said. “It has to be an independent organization. …If it goes back to the police department, I would have concerns (about whether) that is an independent department that is investigating abuse allegations.”
But he added that the Office of Police Accountability is “a good start,” and noted that it is already funded in a tough budget year.
Batchelor pointed out that some critical incidents, including police shootings, are already investigated by outside agencies. Colorado lawmakers banned police departments from investigating their own police shootings in 2015. Other types of complaints are handled solely by the police department’s internal affairs unit.
The city is still considering what the ultimate structure of the office and oversight will look like, Wiles said. The end design may include an advisory board of residents who work with the Office of Police Accountability in some fashion, though their role is limited by the city’s charter.
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