Aurora – Aurora will join Colorado Springs and Lakewood in performing thorough criminal background checks on all employees, but the city of Denver will continue to screen only select workers.
Aurora, the third-largest city in Colorado, changed its policy last week and will run criminal background checks on every employee and volunteer with the city.
The city previously screened only people who worked closely with the public or who handled money.
That changed last week, when Jermaine Vaden, 29, a seasonal Aurora parks employee who was a registered sexual offender from Oklahoma, was arrested for allegedly meeting a teenage boy at a city-run children’s event and later assaulting him, police said.
Vaden had served nine years of a 15-year sentence in Oklahoma for sodomizing two boys, ages 12 and 10, in 1995. Both Colorado Springs, the second-largest city in Colorado, and Lakewood, the fourth-largest, have been screening employees for a number of years.
Lakewood asks applicants to provide addresses going back 10 years. Criminal checks with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation are run, searching only Colorado records. Private investigators are hired to look at out-of-state records, said Stacie Oulton, spokeswoman for Lakewood.
Colorado Springs depends only on a CBI check.
Denver screens only certain employees, depending on the nature of the job. People who work with the public face “systematic background checks,” said Michelle Lucero, deputy city attorney for Denver. Had Vaden been hired by Denver, he would have been screened, she said, because the city screens all of its parks employees.
Aurora is still determining how it will check employees.
“I can tell you that it’s now my top priority as a human resources director,” said the city’s hiring manager, Kin Shuman.
Federal law requires that a state statute be passed for sharing criminal justice records for other purposes, such as the Colorado law that requires fingerprinting law enforcement officers, child-care workers, teachers, emergency medical workers, funeral directors and casino workers.
Shuman said Aurora will retroactively screen its 2,700 permanent employees and 1,000 seasonal workers.
