Jim Collier seems like a nice man.
He was wrong on a lot of things when we talked the other day, but through it all he was very nice about it.
He was Denver police chief for a little more than a year — from September 1991 to October 1992 — under then-Mayor Wellington Webb. By then, he had served 3 1/2 decades in law enforcement.
On Wednesday, in the parking lot of South High School, he delivered a public statement on behalf of what he said were 700 retired Denver officers and their spouses, and the widows of fallen officers.
In it, he expressed dissatisfaction with how “political decisions are made in the Denver mayor’s office that affect the safety and judgment of Denver Police Department operations.”
Basically, he is saying the firing of nine police officers this year for really bad behavior has scared the pants off the officers who remain.
In an interview later that day, he said officers are now simply sitting on their hands out of fear that any action they take could result in losing their jobs, their homes, their families and their future.
Oh, please.
Change is hard.
It doesn’t matter whether you drive a bus or lay tile, any change in the status quo is downright frightening. You can accept the change or you can lash out.
I got the feeling Jim Collier was screaming into the wind.
Perhaps in his day, if you were a man like Alex Landau and you made an illegal left turn and later were found in possession of a little marijuana, you took your beating with fists and metal flashlights, suffered your broken nose, concussion and 45 stitches and simply shut up.
In 2011 Denver, thank heaven, it is not how it is done.
Manager of Safety Charles Garcia has for months been taking names and jotting down badge numbers, emboldened by soon-to-be-former- Mayor Guillermo “Bill” Vidal and a clutch of City Council members exhausted by making settlement payouts for brutality — more than $1 million this year alone.
Yet you have to let Jim Collier have his say, mostly because he has earned it, and because 99 percent of Denver officers every day get up and go about their jobs professionally.
He made his statement, he said, only because now is the time when the new mayor, Michael Hancock, is determining his staff positions.
Jim Collier doesn’t much like that Charles Garcia is a former public defender, who now sits in judgment of all workaday cops.
It would be, he said, like a cop sitting on the Colorado Bar Association making determinations on all lawyer conduct.
“(Lawyers) would be screaming like they were gut-shot,” he said. “And frankly, they would have good reason.”
Police officers, he said, are not anti-discipline. Their profession is based on it.
They are simply sending a message to the new mayor that the manager of public safety must be absolutely fair and impartial, and must be held accountable.
As a cop, “sometimes you have to put hands on people,” Jim Collier said. Officers, he added, are reluctant to do that now.
“The last thing the city and county of Denver needs is a group of police officers sitting around like they are in a firehouse, waiting for the bell to ring. No one is safe that way.”
If you take a look at what he said Wednesday, most of it was based on fear, that if Denver keeps going after bad cops, well, the rest of us will wish it never had.
No, it doesn’t work that way.
We walk our dogs, and the last thing we expect is to be beaten and arrested.
You could ask Mark Ashford, to whom it happened last year, after he interrupted a traffic stop, and for which he got a $35,000 check.
Jim Collier calls such settlements “payoffs” and a sham, and he wants the city to end them.
I am certain Mark Ashford would gladly forsake his payout if he could make the pain go away and get that one day back.
But change is hard.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
