That sentiment was spreading through the country. "In the wake of the Rodney King incident, which was played around the world, it validated for the first time on videotape that the police engaged at times in brutal tactics," says Merrick Bobb, director of the Los Angeles-based Police Assessment Resource Center. "It was shocking, from the President of the United States on down." If the cops weren't capable of policing themselves, then independent oversight agencies would have to break through the thick blue wall. So in the 1990s, cities such as Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Miami and Los Angeles set up police monitoring systems. And now Portland was replacing its volunteer-based Police Internal Investigations Audit Committee (a group the cops had reportedly nicknamed the Poorly Informed Ignorant Asshole Committee) with a more robust Independent Police Review Division, which had the ability to take police-misconduct complaints, monitor internal investigations and recommend policy changes.
Rosenthal arrived in Portland at a time when that city's police department was roiling with problems of its own. Cops were shooting suspects at a rate of one per month, and a spate of high-profile deaths had the public up in arms. The situation was so bad that citizens had put an initiative on the ballot to take all internal misconduct cases out of the police department's hands for good and put them under the authority of an independent investigator.
eric magnussen
Richard Rosenthal keeps an eye on Denver — and its cops.
eric magnussen
Former Citizen Oversight Board chair Joe Sandoval wants to know who's monitoring the monitor.
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While that initiative failed, Rosenthal took it as a sign that he had his work cut out for him. As police auditor and head of the Independent Police Review Commission, he developed a mediation program so that citizens and officers in minor disputes could work out their differences. He created a complaint-management system so that grievances without merit could be dealt with quickly, and those that were valid could receive more attention and resources. And he commissioned Bobb's Police Assessment Resource Center to conduct an extensive review of shootings by officers and in-custody deaths. After the city implemented many of the recommendations in PARC's final report, suspect shootings dropped to one or two a year, reports former Portland city auditor Gary Blackmer, Rosenthal's boss.
Along the way, Rosenthal made a few enemies: In 2003, five members of the eight-member Citizen Review Committee, which collected citizen feedback and reviewed the functions of his office, resigned en masse because they said Rosenthal and his staff stifled public input. Rosenthal had his own concerns about the system. He didn't like that he had no ability to monitor use-of-deadly-force investigations until after the fact; to fully scrutinize the way a police department handled internal investigations, he needed access to the most difficult inquiries of all.
That's what he told the Denver city attorney who called in 2004, said Denver was setting up a similar program and asked Rosenthal what had worked in Portland. And then, when he discovered that Denver's Independent Monitor program seemed to follow his advice word for word — "They had taken the good, gotten rid of the bad and prettied up the ugly," Rosenthal notes — he put his name in for the job.
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In August 2004, Denver unveiled plans for one of the most ambitious police-monitoring programs in the country, one that would have unparalleled access to the inner workings of the city's law enforcement agencies. It came as part of a citywide shakeup triggered by the 2003 killing of Paul Childs by Denver police officers.
The death of Childs, a developmentally disabled fifteen-year-old, sparked widespread public outcry. While Denver cops weren't known for the sort of mass corruption that plagued the LAPD or for being as trigger-happy as their counterparts in Portland, the Denver Police Department often appeared unduly antagonistic. As one veteran officer of another metro police department puts it, "The prevailing thought around other agencies is that the Denver police have traditionally had an old-school mentality of 'Knock heads first, ask questions later.'"
Al LaCabe, whom newly elected mayor John Hickenlooper named Manager of Safety — the civilian authority in charge of the city's police, sheriff and fire departments — seemed to understand where this mentality came from. As a former Marine and New Orleans cop, LaCabe knew how officers balance the need to serve and protect with the desire to make it home in one piece each day — and he knew how easy it was for the latter consideration to override the former. "A lot of what eventually happens in a police-citizen contact or encounter has to do with how both the officer and the citizen approach the encounter in the first place. It sets the tone for what may happen as things unfold," says LaCabe. "It's getting the department and individual officers in the mindset of being true community police officers and understanding the concept of customer service while still understanding that they need to protect themselves from danger."
Part of Denver's problem, he realized, was the lack of any consistent punishment for those who violated this concept of customer service. Like most police departments, the DPD didn't have hard-and-fast discipline guidelines, just a system that based penalties on how punishments had been doled out in years and decades past. The comparative discipline system allowed officers to keep their jobs even when their chief wanted them fired; for example, Officer Matthew Graves, videotaped in 1997 holding a loaded gun to the head of a female prisoner, had kept his badge.
