A celebrated patrol unit of the Westminster Police Department has been disbanded because its commander and two members are subjects of a criminal police- brutality investigation.
Westminster’s six-member Special Crime Attack Team, or SCAT, formed in the 1980s to go after gangs and the city’s most- wanted fugitives, will go unstaffed until Chief Dan Montgomery reorganizes the unit, said Westminster police spokesman Tim Read.
He did not know how long that will take.
The SCAT is an elite group of decorated officers with a long history of accomplishments, Montgomery said.
“They go out and target the worst of the worst,” he said. “It’s a premium assignment. We try to put our best officers on SCAT. You get to work the hard, high-profile cases.”
SCAT members don’t wear uniforms, and they travel in unmarked police cars.
Earlier this year, SCAT broke up a “smash and grab” burglary ring. Over the course of several months, the suspects broke into 11 liquor and cigarette stores in Westminster, stole merchandise and sometimes cash registers, and fled.
On March 13, the officers had the Country Meadows Liquor Store under surveillance when members of the ring broke into the business, almost on cue. When the suspects ran out of the store, the SCAT members arrested five of them, Read said.
In April, when 150 local and federal officers fanned out across the Denver area targeting a drug-racketeering syndicate with ties to murders, SCAT made a high number of arrests, Read said. SCAT tracked down and arrested 18 of the 34 suspected drug dealers, killers and prostitutes who were part of the syndicate, headquartered at the Alpine Rose Motel on Federal Boulevard, he said.
“These are all good cops,” Montgomery said. “I was on the unit years ago.”
The accomplishments of SCAT make the August incident that resulted in charges of police brutality all the more difficult to understand, he said.
“We expect so much more than that, ” he said.
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-820-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
