*****
I'm up at 4 am so often
anthony camera
Alex Landau wouldn't let paramedics help him until they took photos of his injuries.
Alex Landau wouldn't let paramedics help him until they took photos of his injuries.
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Even when alarms aren't set my clock's poppin'
I'm low key, you know me
Especially when the cops are watchin'
Must be my conscience telling me to stop talkin'
To every one of these strangers who are barkin'
But really aren't involved in the success of my squadron
The Denver-based law office of John Robert Holland has looked into some striking cases in its practice focusing on race discrimination and civil rights abuses. Holland and his partners, Anna Holland Edwards and Erica Tick Grossman, have litigated abuse and neglect at nursing homes, sued the Denver Zoo for working conditions that allegedly left a worker with lung disease, and in 2007 successfully won freedom for a detainee at Guantánamo.
Still, the lawyers were taken aback when Landau came to them last year with his story — and with the photos the cop had taken of his injuries, which he'd obtained during his criminal case.
"Those photographs speak volumes," says John Holland. "One of the things that struck me was when he said he didn't want the paramedics to do anything, and he demanded that photographs be taken before he was treated. It struck me that this was the kind of person who wanted to bear witness that this was done to him."
The firm took Landau's case and this past August delivered a letter detailing Landau's story to Denver City Attorney David Fine and then-Mayor John Hickenlooper, one that included the bloody photographs. Fine agreed to meet with Landau, and not long after that meeting, the DPD's Internal Affairs Bureau opened an investigation into the case, rescinding its decision of more than a year earlier that such an inquiry wasn't warranted.
This wasn't the first allegation of police-department violence to surface in August. One case in particular attracted national attention: In April 2009, Denver cops were captured by the police's citywide video surveillance system using a department-issued weapon called a sap to repeatedly beat Michael DeHerrera, a young man who is the son of a Pueblo sheriff's deputy. Even with that video replaying over and over on television, new Denver Manager of Safety Ron Perea, who'd replaced Al LaCabe, refused to fire the two officers involved in DeHerrera's beating — one of them Randy Murr.
But within a few days, Perea himself had resigned. And in September, City Attorney Fine reported to the Denver City Council that over the past six years, the city had been involved in 63 excessive-force lawsuits against police, for which it had paid out more than $5 million in settlements.
Nationwide, allegations of police brutality are on the rise; according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics, federal cases involving law enforcement authorities using excessive force or violating civil rights increased 25 percent between 2001 and 2007. The National Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest police union, has suggested the rise could be due to aggressive post-9/11 hiring pushes, coupled with reduced training standards. Three years ago, the DPD launched its biggest recruiting effort ever, ending up with 65 more officers than it had the budget for.
"It's primarily a white-male police force," says Art Way, director of the Colorado Progressive Coalition's Racial Justice and Civil Rights Program. "It seems like all they want to hire are military types from Montana." The power of the local police union, coupled with cozy relationships between the police department and both the Denver District Attorney's Office and the city's Office of the Independent Monitor, which monitors internal law-enforcement investigations, makes it difficult for decision-makers to come down hard on cops who step out of line, he adds.
"In my mind, Denver has an old-style policing culture," says Joe Sandoval, a criminal justice professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver who monitored police discipline issues first as a member of the city's Public Safety Review Commission and then as the first chair of the commission's successor, the Citizen Oversight Board. "It seems to me that there has been a conscious effort on the part of Hickenlooper, Al LaCabe and [DPD chief] Gerald Whitman to turn the Denver police culture around. But informally, the Denver police are known throughout the metro area by other officers as a place where they knock heads and take names later."
Richard Rosenthal, who's been the city's independent monitor since the position was created five years ago, thinks the recent attention does not reflect a police force out of control, but rather a very transparent citywide monitoring system. "In many other cities, the public would not become aware of accusations of excessive force," he says. "Such cases are dealt with behind closed doors, and quite often there is no public reporting. Denver has chosen to have robust, professional oversight and reporting. I am required to report publicly if I believe a [police administrative] decision is unreasonable, and that will get media attention." Rosenthal, for example, made it clear he disagreed with Perea's decision not to come down harder on the officers involved in the DeHerrera beating.
Whatever the reason, reports of police brutality in Denver are definitely on the upswing. For the past two years, David Packman, a Seattle man who spent a month in jail for first-degree assault before being cleared because of video evidence, has run the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project, tracking reports of police misconduct across the country. In September, he decided to look into the reports coming out of Denver. And while he determined that Colorado as a whole fell comfortably in the middle of the national pack in terms of reported police misconduct — in 2009, the state ranked 29th in terms of publicized misconduct incidents per law-enforcement officers — the city of Denver didn't fare so well. Between January and June 2010, Packman found reports of nineteen Denver officers involved in alleged police misconduct, placing the city the sixth-worst out of the 63 police departments with more than 1,000 officers that he tracked nationwide.
