The two things that keep big-city mayors awake nights are blizzards and petulant cops. Since it’s August in Denver, it’s a fair guess the weather isn’t disturbing Mayor John Hickenlooper’s sleep these days.
But at a time when public accountability, belt-tightening and pay-for-performance plans are all the rage in government agencies, the obstinacy of the Denver Police Department toward needed reforms is enough to give us all nightmares.
That’s not to say life as a cop is easy.
The combination of tight city budgets and the retirements of baby boomers on the force unquestionably has left the force seriously understaffed. The department has been stuck with technology that was outmoded 20 years ago. And the recent fatal shooting of off-duty Detective Donnie Young serves as a reminder of just how dangerous it is to be a cop.
Still, I wonder how long I’d have a job if I unilaterally reduced my output by 35 percent because my morale was low.
Now before you burn up your laptops sending me a storm of vitriol about how underappreciated police officers are and how soft my life is, I want to be the first to say all that is true. The only time I fear for my life is when I write about football. The cops put their lives on the line every day, and I appreciate that.
In a perfect world, cops would be making buckets of money and professional football players would be working nights directing traffic at DIA to pay the rent.
But we live in the real world.
And here in the real world, the community has expressed some understandable curiosity about what on earth the cops were thinking when they shot a disabled man in bed in 2004 and a developmentally disabled teenager at his home in 2003, keeping Denver among the cities with the highest number of fatal police shootings per capita in America.
I know this because I’ve seen the rallies outside the City and County Building and the letters to the editor every time another review comes back justifying these shootings. Another clue that the community is troubled by these events is the $10 million lawsuit filed in the 2004 shooting and the $1.325 million the city paid to settle the case in the 2003 incident.
Police Chief Gerry Whitman has cited several policy changes that also have undermined morale in the ranks. Among them: the suggestion that maybe high-speed chases through the city should be curtailed after it became clear that they were putting a lot of innocent bystanders at risk of death; the idea that racial profiling might not be the best way to establish probable cause, at least not under the U.S. Constitution as it currently stands; and the uproar over keeping secret spy files on known Quakers and other subversives.
I’m afraid most of us in Denver aren’t sympathetic with the toll these reforms have taken on police morale.
But clearly we have a problem, and the proposal to hire an outside consultant to do a performance audit on the Denver Police Department seems like a good idea.
“There certainly are benefits that we could gain from an outside audit,” Cole Finnegan, the mayor’s acting chief of staff, said cautiously. “We need to be sure we know exactly what we’re measuring and what we’re trying to understand and improve.”
Even Whitman agrees – with a few qualifications.
“If it builds public confidence in what we do,” he’s all for it – as long as it doesn’t drain money from the anemic department budget. “I hate to spend a lot of money on anything but people,” he said.
Fair enough.
But with police overtime in excess of $6 million a year, arrests down 35 percent and city revenues from tickets and fines dropping, taxpayers have a right to know what’s going on.
Is it really just a matter of too much paperwork and too little staff? Are the police adequately trained and effectively managed?
Or is it maybe that what we have here is a failure to communicate?
Before the city spends $13 million a year on the Police Department’s staffing requests, we deserve some answers.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
