Richard Rosenthal spent more than six years working on behalf of consistent and meaningful discipline in the Denver Police Department, rolling out to the scene of shootings and monitoring the internal investigations that followed, as well as tracking scores of other probes involving alleged misconduct.
As the city’s official police watchdog, the former prosecutor has been a leading voice insisting that cops who lie about serious matters be fired, and he has been vindicated on one major controversy after another.
So how did the Hancock administration treat Rosenthal on his way out the door this week to take a job in Vancouver? It smeared him. It dismissed him as an uppity bureaucrat who doesn’t know his place and who had no right to rip the Internal Affairs Bureau in his final report.
“I think he has confused his role and overstepped his bounds,” said Manager of Safety Alex Martinez, who has been on the job for all of two months and has almost no first-hand knowledge to confirm or refute the conduct Rosenthal targeted.
“He is criticizing things that don’t affect the final outcome,” Martinez added. “If he agrees with the outcome, it is not something to be concerned about.”
Can Martinez be serious? Can he actually believe it doesn’t matter whether Internal Affairs drags its feet on investigations and has to be prodded into taking “basic investigative steps,” as Rosenthal maintains? Does he honestly not care whether the bureau deploys untrained officers who conduct clumsy, biased interviews — so long as the “final outcome” is satisfactory?
And what’s this nonsense about Rosenthal always being happy with the final outcome? Maybe Martinez should give the report he denounced a closer read.
To be sure, Rosenthal may be premature in suggesting that the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice investigate the department. The federal government has a role to play in rooting out local corruption, but primarily when an entire department is in cover-up mode and city officials appear indifferent to the abuses. It’s simply too early to make that case against the Hancock administration given the recent arrival of both Martinez and a new police chief.
Still, Martinez’s shabby treatment of Rosenthal is alarming, as is city hall’s decision “to review the status and role” of the watchdog office. Is the Hancock administration toying with the idea of muzzling the monitor, perhaps by moving it into the safety manager’s office?
Remember, it was Rosenthal who raised the alarm 18 months ago when former Safety Manager Ron Perea gave a wrist slap to two officers who lied in official reports to justify the sapping of a man they arrested outside a LoDo nightclub.
And it was Rosenthal who forcefully objected the other day to a Civil Service panel’s decision to reinstate two officers fired for lying about a chase of a stolen car they’d refused to shut down despite a direct order.
Denver is appealing the reinstatement of Officers David Torrez and Jose Palomares. But the case nevertheless reveals what’s potentially at stake if the city begins to distance itself from the disciplinary reforms of the Hickenlooper years — reforms the police union has vociferously opposed.
Under those reforms, officers are supposed to be terminated if they willfully lie in connection with an official investigation or administrative or judicial proceeding.
Torrez and Palomares did lie, as the Civil Service panel itself concluded. They lied not only to two sergeants on the scene, but also to Internal Affairs and finally to the panel itself. Incredibly, however, the panel nevertheless said the city failed to prove the officers were aware that their misstatements amounted to a “material deception.”
Back in the good old days, when Denver tolerated liars on its police force, Rosenthal’s indignation over the panel’s decision would have sounded quaint. Now it sounds like mainstream public opinion. But does the safety manager share it? That too is among the important questions raised by his eagerness to discredit the departing watchdog.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
