"In either case, we don't believe there was any violation of CALEA standards," Davis says. "Now, if an employee is deficient in the way they do their jobs, that's something for the agency to deal with. CALEA doesn't say how to define someone as deficient."
After Davis completes his on-site report, which he'll pass along with his endorsement, he'll send it to a panel of five commissioners. On March 22, Chief of Police Saint Vincent and Lieutenant Kevin Thelen will travel to Las Vegas for one last appearance before the accreditation board. A panel will volley a few questions at Saint Vincent and Thelen -- maybe ten minutes' worth, since several departments will be there for the same reason -- and then send the issue to all 21 commissioners for a vote. Rarely, if ever, Thelen says, has the entire commission overturned the blessings of the smaller panel.
David Rehor
On patrol: Sharon Conner and her daughter, Audra, found Alan Conner's body.
Face off: Levi Cumins, after an encounter with Terry Mosley's baseball bat.
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"We explored every facet of their department," Davis says, "including management, operations, policies and procedures. Everything that we saw under those entities, we were satisfied with the way they run them. They run a very good police department, and you can tell that every part of the department is well-managed."
Sharon Conner disagrees. Every day.
She still has to drive by that King Soopers on Iliff and Buckley. She doesn't do her shopping there anymore, but she still passes the piece of earth that marks her son's death, and she -- not the police officers -- is the one stuck replaying everything in her head. There was nothing they could have done. It pains her to think that Terry Mosley was a suspect in an assault case five months earlier but that the police chased him only after her son was murdered. When the police explained, "Even if Mosley was arrested right away, he would have been back on the streets by October 15," she felt like they hadn't heard her at all. It wasn't that Mosley needed to be in jail that day, but maybe if he'd been arrested for his actions once, maybe served up a dose of humility, then maybe he'd have felt less invincible, maybe learned something.
Sometimes when it's all running around in her mind and she's passing that grocery store, she can lend a generous moment to the Aurora police. Sometimes she tries to imagine the job of the police officers, the darkness of that morning, the size of that parking lot. "I could have seen it if, if" -- and she wants to come up with an excuse, an answer. "No. I can't see it. I can't see it at all. They should have found him."
