Aurora’s new chief of police apologized profusely, multiple times on the phone with me Wednesday. She apologized to the family traumatized by her officers on Sunday when they mistakenly took Brittney Gilliam into custody at gunpoint and forced her crying children and nieces onto the ground. She apologized to the broader community.
And while her apologies are not enough, Vanessa Wilson also said definitively: “This community is tired; they are fed up, and they are not going to continue to accept the apologies. Apologies are wearing thin, and I absolutely get that. We have to do better, and we have to do better now. There is no waiting.”
That is no small thing. The Aurora Police Department, the Aurora city manager who has authority over it and the elected officials who empower the city manager have been saying for years that everything in the department is just fine, despite mounting evidence that things are not fine. After The Denver Post published an editorial calling for the department to be “fixed,” in November 2019, city officials and former Chief of Police Nick Metz pushed back hard on the narrative that the department had a culture problem.
So what has spurred Wilson to abandon that nothing-to-see-here approach and pledge to look into reforms that will help her department, her officers and the community?
I would argue few could watch the video and not be moved to push for change. Four Black girls between the ages of 6 and 17 were lying on the ground, crying and begging to hug one another while Aurora police stood over them for more than a minute before deciding to let these children sit up. This video, like the video of George Floyd dying at the hands of Minneapolis police, pulls at the soul. It underscores the cost of silence. We can no longer be silent.
I have written about my concerns here and there over the years about the Aurora Police Department, but I should have been relentless in my demands for change. I have known that something in that department, something that goes far beyond procedural training and the use-of-force policies on paper, was rotten.
There’s a juxtaposition in Aurora of two much-needed significant changes in culture at odds with each other. On the one hand, you have the demand for change in the ongoing mistreatment of people of color at the hands of police across the country, which is magnified in Aurora; on the other hand, you have the first woman named as chief of police of that city, which not an insignificant moment in history for the entire nation.
Wilson’s historic moment of being named police chief is overshadowed by the crises she faces.
I’ll cheer for her to be the person who repairs the department in a meaningful way to ensure that the many good officers on the force are able to continue to do their jobs valiantly while those who are incapable of coming along with her vision for the department are cut loose. But if she cannot make changes rapidly, I’ll also be calling for her replacement.
“I’m open to whatever the community needs. We need help. I would love to bring an expert in to train implicit bias training,” she said.
The department needs that. The department also needs an oversight board that is truly independent (perhaps even with a lead investigator elected by the community, given an independent budget set by the council and a staff at his or her bidding) to follow up on complaints from the community, other police officers and all deadly use of force events — something similar to Denver’s independent monitor position. Investigations must be completed quickly and then released to the public.
The last column I wrote about the Aurora Police Department was after a surveillance camera outside a hospital captured an officer behaving badly in 2017. OyZhana Williams was talking to an officer outside his patrol car after she had driven someone to the hospital with a gunshot wound. The officer said she assaulted him and resisted arrest – she was arrested and charged, spending Christmas Day in jail.
But the video showed a different story. Williams dropped the keys to her car on the ground and then sat down in the back of the officer’s patrol car. He physically pulled her out of the car and a violent struggle ensued that seemed more like self-defense by Williams than resisting arrest.
The police department and the city refused to apologize to Williams after paying her $335,000 to settle her lawsuit.
“This case was settled for the reason that many cases are settled – to avoid the cost of prolonged litigation,” the city’s statement said. “That cost would have far exceeded the value of the settlement.”
A city with any integrity would have forced the officers involved to apologize personally and publicly to Williams and pledge to do better. Instead, an internal affairs investigation lagged for years. The outcome has never been reported publicly.
I advised the city to treat Williams like a victim — a woman in pink pajamas who drove someone to the hospital looking for help and instead had her life turned upside down by overly aggressive officers. No one was listening then.
Today, I advise the police department to treat Brittney Gilliam like a victim — a woman who was out for a girls’ day with her daughters and nieces and instead had to watch a six-year-old child with a pink crown on her head be forced to the ground by police.
Megan Schrader is editor of The Denver Post opinion pages.
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