Alex Landau
grins and waves at the thirty people seated in a circle around him at the
Hiawatha Davis Community Center in Park Hill. He lives in this neighborhood and
knew many of them even before his bloody face made the news. "My name is
Alex Landau, and I'm going to teach you some tips and phrases to use with law
enforcement, if you're ever in a situation where you need them," he says. "Let's
hope you're not. A couple years ago, I could have used some of these."
The now-23-year-old college student has been
telling his story for three and a half years in various forums — to friends,
strangers, city officials, and now as an instructor at a know-your-rights
training with the Colorado Progressive Coalition. "A few years ago, I was
racially profiled by the Denver Police Department," he begins. "I had
a gun put to my head. I was laughed at and called a nigger. They beat me until
I bled."
On the night of January 15, 2009, Landau, then a
nineteen-year-old about to start his third semester at Community College of
Denver, and a friend, Addison Hunold,
were headed to Wendy's in Landau's car when an officer
pulled them over near the corner of 16th Avenue and Emerson Street. He told
Landau that he'd made an illegal left turn, requested his identification, then
asked to search his vehicle. Landau approved, and Hunold voluntarily handed
over a pill container full of weed. But there was more in the trunk, and the
two grew nervous. When officer Ricky Nixon
approached the back of the car, Landau asked if he had a warrant to search the
trunk — and the situation suddenly changed. Nixon punched Landau in the face,
Landau remembers, and then officers Randy Murr
and Tiffany Middleton joined in a brawl that sent
all four tumbling to the ground. They hit Landau with their fists, a police
radio and a metal flashlight, he says. At one point, he felt a gun against the
side of his face. Before he was taken to the hospital — where he was given 45
stitches — he demanded that paramedics take photographs of the damage.
Those photographs helped convince the city to pay
Landau a record settlement two years ago.
"But what happened after that?" someone
in the audience asks. "How does your story end?"
"It hasn't," Landau answers.
**********
Hours after Landau was released from Denver Health
in January 2009, the Denver district attorney charged him with attempting to
disarm a police officer: Nixon was claiming that Landau had reached for
Middleton's gun. Landau denied it, and kept denying it when he was offered a
plea deal that would downgrade the Class 6 felony charge to a misdemeanor and
lower the time Landau might face in prison, originally up to eighteen months.
Landau refused the deal, and seven months later, the DA dropped the charge
against him. By then, the DPD's Internal Affairs Bureau had already decided
that Nixon, Murr and Middleton had acted in accordance with DPD policy and shut
the book on the incident.
But Landau's case lived on in the legal system. In
January 2011, attorney John Holland filed suit on Landau's behalf
against Nixon, Murr, Middleton, then-Chief of Police Gerald Whitman and the
City and County of Denver, alleging that his client's civil rights had been
violated when he was racially profiled. In a letter notifying city officials of
the pending suit, Holland had included the photos that Landau had insisted be
taken that night. In them, Landau's face is swollen and bloody. His nasal
passage is reinforced with a breathing tube and his neck is supported by a
brace. He cannot open his right eye. And the attorney also informed the city of
the words Landau remembers hearing as he was beaten: "Where's that warrant
now, you fucking nigger?" (See "Black and Blue," January 20,
2011.)
Just four months after the suit was filed, in May
2011, the city awarded Landau $795,000 in an out-of-court settlement that also
called for the DPD to conduct a formal investigation into the officers'
behavior that night.
Changes within the DPD's disciplinary system slowed
the progress of that investigation, however. Manager of
Safety Al LaCabe had already devoted years to updating the DPD's
disciplinary matrix, establishing a stricter, more cohesive plan for dealing
with accusations of officer misconduct. Under this update, for example,
officers who lie during an investigation can be fired for the offense. Soon
after announcing the new standards — in January 2009, the same month that
Landau was pulled over — LaCabe said that he would be leaving his job of six
years. That June, Mayor John Hickenlooper replaced LaCabe with former Secret Service official Ron Perea,
who lasted two months before he, too, vacated the position.
When Hickenlooper left the mayor's office to run
for governor in 2010, Bill Vidal, who replaced him, said he was determined to
clean up the DPD's many outstanding cases involving alleged police misconduct,
and ultimately appointed former chief public defender Charles Garcia
to the manager of safety post. (Garcia was the fourth to hold that slot in less
than a year.) And clean up he did, terminating seven officers in four months.
Many of those officers subsequently appealed their firing to Denver's Civil
Service Commission.
Outstanding police-brutality cases were a major
discussion point in the 2011 mayoral race. During his run, Michael Hancock
called for structural reform within the DPD.
"The people of Denver wanted to see some bold
leadership steps within the Denver Police Department to begin to put it back on
track," Hancock says today. "I don't believe there's a more sacred
bond in public, municipal government than between the police department and the
people, and that had clearly been jeopardized by some actions that had been
taken and some leadership that had been missing. These are long-term,
organizational, culture-changing moves we're attempting to make."
Among Hancock's moves after he took office in July
2011: appointing former Colorado Supreme Court justice Alex Martinez to the manager of safety
position and hiring Robert White
to be the city's new chief of police. And in the six-plus months that they've
been on the job, both Martinez and White have made their own hires: Former
judge Jess Vigil joined the Office of the
Manager of Safety as the new manager of police discipline, and Michael Battista
moved up in the DPD to become its conduct review commander. The DPD's Internal
Affairs Bureau also has a new top officer: Mary Beth Klee, who has since added twelve
investigators.
The change in investigation oversight is only one
in a large catalogue that White has instituted since he moved to Denver from Louisville, Kentucky.
In February, he began by cutting administrative spots within the department to
move seventy officers to the streets, and he has been aggressive about both
decentralizing the DPD and bringing civilians in: If a position does not
require a gun and a badge, he says, it does not require an officer. The next
series of changes within the DPD will be finalized by the end of the year,
White says, adding that by then he hopes to end the internal stagnation that
resulted from a years-long hiring freeze by offering officers the opportunity
to compete for promotions.
Martinez and White have also worked to streamline
oversight of the investigations, removing at least four layers of review from
each investigation of officer misconduct. Translation: They should be 50
percent faster, White says. Before these changes, every investigation of a DPD
officer rotated through a district commander, a division chief, a bureau chief
and other officials before landing on the police chief's desk — and then moving
on to the manager of safety. Under the revised structure, they now progress
from Internal Affairs to Battista to White, then move on to Vigil and Martinez.
The benefits of the system are twofold, White says: The department can maintain
consistency across investigations of alleged police misconduct while proving
competent to manage its own affairs — and hopefully, public perception will
adapt to the positive changes and overcome the mistrust that White sees now.
"Officers have a great deal of discretion, and
if that discretion is not used in the best interest of the community, it raises
a lot of issues about the department, especially in the community," White
says. "Many of those issues we will win over, and they'll see that this is
a very good, professional police department. And it's getting better."
Under the previous system, review of completed
investigations of officers averaged between sixty and ninety days. White and
Martinez hope to soon whittle that down to between 30 and 45. "You [were]
putting that on someone's desk who has another job," Martinez says.
"I can tell you specific examples where it's like, 'Take the file, go
home, we'll put someone else on your job. Get it done.' That is over."
Both White and Martinez say they've already seen
noticeable improvements in the amount of time it takes to process
investigations, and they have completed more than a dozen in the three months
since Vigil and Battista came on board. Still, they're mired in a backlog of
cases, what White calls a "bottleneck" of older investigations that
were slowed by LaCabe's work on the discipline matrix, then reassigned from the
previous system to the new one when the department changed over. Last year, 200
formal investigations moved across the manager of safety's desk. They are hopeful
that that number will increase this year.
"I am extremely confident that we will do
extraordinarily well on the vast majority of cases," Martinez says.
"On the really difficult cases, that will be the real test — whether we
also move those a lot faster. That's what people will notice, for sure."
People certainly noticed that Landau's case was
going nowhere — fast. The formal investigation into his beating, triggered by
the city's settlement in April 2011, was part of that backlog. After meeting
with Landau, who had since become involved with the Colorado Progressive
Coalition (CPC), a sixteen-year-old social-justice nonprofit that focuses on
racial and economic issues, the chief promised that the investigation would be
complete this spring. "The civil judgment that was settled left the
situation where something doesn't look right," Martinez says. "We
settle a case for that much money and there's no discipline in it? It's hard to
explain, and a first glance at that is that something's amiss."
After missing two self-imposed deadlines, in May
White invited everyone involved in the initial case to individually demonstrate
the actions they had explained in their statements — basically, to reenact
them. Landau aggressively refused, calling the request an insult that asked him
to essentially relive the worst night of his life.
"A lot of that came around because of the use
of the word 'reenactment,' which I would suggest is a poor choice of
words," Martinez says. "'Reenactment' makes it sound like we're
producing a video."
White went forward without Landau's participation,
and in a joint statement released in early June, White and Martinez wrote that
"the investigation is now complete." But they also said that they
were not releasing the results of their investigation — because the Federal Bureau of
Investigation was now on the case.
For years, the Colorado branch of the American Civil
Liberties Union, the CPC and other anti-police-brutality groups had
tried to convince the Department of Justice
to investigate the DPD. But the FBI's investigation, announced publicly on June
4, is not the top-to-bottom standards-and-practices review that they had pushed
for: According to Dave Joly,
spokesman for the Denver division of the FBI, the agency is focusing
specifically on Landau's case. And while the FBI does its own investigation of
that incident, any action by the city is on hold.
"The right of the City of Denver to discipline
police internally does not depend on what the FBI thinks of crime," argues
Holland, Landau's attorney, who calls the added delay "hilarious."
"These are completely independent functions. It's like they're betting on
something."
For his part, Martinez estimates a delay of at
least six months and perhaps as much as a year before the city can release the
report on its own investigation and take any disciplinary action against the
officers involved. "It's not a result that hasn't been released," he
clarifies. "The decision is to wait for any additional information before
we make a decision. The simple reason is to be sure we're considering
everything there is to be considered. If they come up with something we haven't
seen or aren't aware of, we want to see it."
It would be "foolish" not to wait for the
outcome of the FBI's investigation, White says, adding that because the clock
has already been ticking for three years, time is no longer of the essence.
"What's the likelihood that the situation is
going to come out different?" Martinez asks. "Probably not great.
There's no way to fix the problem, at this point in time, with how long this
has taken. Since you can't fix that, it seems that getting it right seems to
weigh heavier than getting it done."
The federal investigation brings with it an
extension of resources, including the ability to subpoena witnesses and
immunize them against prosecution. "They are bigger, stronger, scarier,
basically," Martinez says. The FBI is working independently of the DPD and
the Office of the Manager of Safety, he notes; it was a courtesy of the DOJ to
even notify the city of the investigation. The process will take investigators
back to square one as the federal team sifts through evidence in order to
decide whether to pursue criminal prosecution of the officers.
Landau was made aware of the FBI's involvement at
the end of April and has shared his story with federal investigators in the
intervening months.
"If the FBI comes to the right decision in
this case, I believe we can convince them to later investigate the entire
police department," Landau says. "It's a start. It just happens to be
a really long one."
**********
Landau's investigation is not the only process
that's been dragging on. Last year, the City of Denver spent $1.34 million
settling police-brutality lawsuits. More than half of that was connected with
Landau's case. But along with the DPD's current backlog of officer-misconduct
investigations, a few high-profile cases have yet to come to a real conclusion.
In April 2009, a few months after Landau was pulled
over, then-23-year-old Michael DeHerrera
and his partner, Shawn Johnson,
were beaten by DPD officers in LoDo — an incident that was caught on camera.
Then-Manager of Safety Ron Perea originally suspended Randy Murr, who was also
involved in the Landau case, and Devin Sparks for three days as punishment
for their actions. But that decision created such a firestorm of controversy
that Perea left and the DPD reopened its investigation. Seven months later,
then-Manager of Safety Charles Garcia called for both men, who were found to
have lied about the proceedings, to be fired — but the officers appealed to the
city's Civil Service Commission, the organization responsible for hearing
disciplinary appeals for the Denver police, fire and sheriff's departments.
The commission's hearing panel sided with Perea,
supporting a technicality and reinstating the officers without actually holding
an appeal hearing. But in April, the commission ruled that the hearing panel
had made a mistake in reinstating Sparks and Murr, who were re-fired. They
still have the opportunity to appeal their termination, however — and will go
in front of the same hearing panel in October.
Officers Ricky Nixon, who'd originally pulled
Landau over, and Kevin Devine
were involved in another controversial 2009 incident, in which they beat and
maced a group of women on camera outside the Denver Diner. Originally fired by
Garcia, they, too, appealed, and are now back on the force — at least until a
Civil Service Commission panel can hear an appeal of that firing. A clerical
error was responsible for this snafu: City lawyers missed their deadline to ask
for a delay in reinstatement by four days, allowing Nixon and Devine to return
to the force by default.
During the initial investigation of that incident,
Mary Beth Klee, now head of Internal Affairs, and other DPD supervisors
testified that the officers involved had acted within their job descriptions;
that inspired the CPC to raise concerns about Klee's promotion. "I think
the public should understand that some of these things are not clear
outcomes," Martinez says. "Simply because two parties do not agree
does not mean either one is being unreasonable or either one is being
unbiased."
And other controversial cases have reached some kind
of closure. In July 2011, 29-year-old Alonzo Ashley died during an incident at
the Denver Zoo when he allegedly attacked a zoo guard. The eight officers
involved in Ashley's case will not face any charges; in January, Martinez's
office released its decision not to discipline those present that night.
Also in July 2011, inmate Marvin Booker died in jail after five
sheriff's deputies subdued him. Camera footage captured the incident and made
its rounds on the Internet, showing Booker waiting to be booked into the system
and then becoming embroiled in a physical struggle with the deputies. Booker
was warned to stop struggling or risk being tased — and the deputies made good
on the threat, also using a carotid hold on Booker. Later, inside his cell,
Booker could not be resuscitated by medical experts. The manager of safety
declined to terminate any of the deputies, but the sheriff's department has
stopped using the carotid hold.
And back in 2003, DPD officer James Turney shot fifteen-year-old Paul Childs four times and killed him.
According to accounts of the incident, Childs, who was developmentally
disabled, held a sizable knife. Turney earned a ten-month suspension based on
alleged procedural errors in his actions. The incident also inspired John Hickenlooper,
just elected mayor of Denver, to establish the Office
of the Independent Monitor.
**********
Denver is still searching for a permanent
replacement for Richard Rosenthal,
the city's first independent monitor, who resigned from the post he'd held for
almost seven years in late December to take a job in Vancouver. "Walking into that office
every day is like walking into the eye of a storm," says Rosenthal.
"And that never changes."
Facing a crisis of confidence in the DPD, in 2005
Hickenlooper created the Office of the Independent Monitor, which was approved
by city ordinance. The office's primary function is to serve as a civilian
watchdog, providing oversight by reviewing and analyzing all investigations of
officer misconduct within the DPD and the Denver Sheriff's Department, then
submitting a disciplinary recommendation to the Office of the Manager of Safety
once the review is complete. In 2011, the Office of the Independent Monitor
reviewed 941 cases. Landau's was not one of them.
Mayor Hancock has vowed to keep the independent
monitor position. After an audit last year found certain passages in the
ordinance establishing the office to be vague and "problematic,"
Hancock convened a committee to review the ordinance and consider making
changes in the office — even as the city searched for someone to fill it.
Potential fixes could range from establishing term limits to disassociating the
monitor from low-level cases, a move that Rosenthal sees as a grave mistake.
Limiting the ability of the monitor to exercise discretion would be a huge step
backward, he says, one that would compromise the "independent" part
of the role.
"There has been a tradition in Denver of
Internal Affairs not identifying when officers lied," Rosenthal says,
calling the proposal to pull out low-level cases "a way to avoid
oversight." So-called small issues that aren't resolved often become big
issues, he explains, and many apparently minor investigations he encountered
during his days in Denver grew bigger than he expected. "There were cases
where I had to stop a case and send it back to the chief because they were
ignoring big issues. It's essential to the structure of oversight enforcement
in Denver that the independent monitor be allowed to choose which cases enter
that office."
After Rosenthal announced his resignation, Hancock
organized a committee to search for his successor; by April, that committee had
reviewed the 110-member pool of applicants and, after interviewing nine
candidates, settled on three finalists. All three came to Denver to participate
in community forums, and Hancock offered the job to Julie Ruhlin. But she turned it down,
opting instead to remain in her current job in Los Angeles County.
So in June, the nomination committee went back to
square one, reopening the application process to consider additional
candidates. This week, the committee hopes to send a second round of finalists
to Hancock.
Rosenthal's biggest fear is that the spot could go
to someone with no oversight experience. Rosenthal was disappointed that after
Ruhlin rejected the offer, Hancock did not turn to either of the other
finalists, both of whom have extensive oversight experience. "The manager
is obviously a civilian, but the successes of the department are his successes
and the failures are his failures," Rosenthal says. "The independence
of the office utterly requires someone who knows what they're doing and can
bring professionalism to that position and a scrutiny of public comments and
comments from the manager of safety. You can't have independence without
someone who can think independently. You might as well make the monitor a
deputy manager of safety."
In his final report as the independent monitor,
Rosenthal noted a need for strict separation of the office and the DPD.
"Bias on the part of the Internal Affairs Bureau investigators and
supervisors has been documented in many cases over the past year," he
wrote in January. "It is the opinion of the Monitor that these cases
evidence substantial problems in the way the Denver Police Department is
currently policing itself. The Manager of Safety and the new Chief of Police
must change the current culture in Internal Affairs to ensure unbiased,
thorough and complete investigations and the appropriate documentation of such
investigations."
For his part, Martinez says he's remaining neutral
about any possible changes to the Office of the Independent Monitor, including
removing smaller cases from its purview. "In my view, a good monitor
probably won't go there anyway, so why does it matter?" he asks. "I
think we could include that if we're trying to improve the ordinance, but if
people are upset about it, it's not worth it." The one change he requests
is the opportunity to add his own response to the monitor's reports before they
are published: He'd like to give the public the chance to digest both voices at
once, he explains. But the change isn't critical, he says. "Just some
manners, really," he jokes. "That's all I want."
Hancock had appointed Holland to the committee
considering potential changes to the monitor's office — but the attorney quit
the committee last month, after it became clear that it wouldn't institute real
structural reform, he says. "I think Denver has lived through an
unbelievable scandal," says Holland. "Now we have a public that no
longer trusts our police department."
Holland calls the independent monitor's office as
it stands an "impotent," "insufficient" structure that does
not have the power to influence the city's police oversight system in any
significant way. As it is, officer-misconduct investigations are routed through
the DPD's Internal Affairs Bureau, then funneled through layers of review by
the DPD and the Office of the Manager of Safety — parties that have a stake in
the outcome, he points out, and cannot be overruled by the independent monitor.
Instead, he's urging the city to adopt the "Taj Mahal of due process": a
three-panel civilian review board comprising lawyers or judges who would have
the power to both make disciplinary recommendations and enforce the punishments
that come with them. The American Civil Liberties Union has championed similar
models in Florida and Missouri, among other states.
"I can't think of a better analogy for
Denver's model than the fox guarding the henhouse," Holland says.
"The city needs to think about making a process we can believe in, because
the one we've got now is bad for the chickens."
**********
After Alex Landau finishes his story — or at least
reaches its still-inconclusive end — others at the training session share
theirs. A few chairs to his left sits Shawn Johnson, who was beaten by police
officers along with partner Michael DeHerrera in LoDo in April 2009.
One woman is here for her son, who woke up from a
coma in the hospital days after he was arrested in Denver; he has no idea how
he got there. His mother was ten years old when she saw Martin Luther King Jr.
give a speech in Birmingham,
her childhood home. "I saw the dogs, the demonstrations, the church on
fire," she says. "The only thing that has changed is our age. My goal
is to keep up the fight."
Landau's session lasts almost three hours, during
which he fills page after page of oversized white paper with his audience's
thoughts and his own messy handwriting. As the participants speak, he scribbles
down their feedback with a black Sharpie,
nodding his head or asking for clarification. "But what do you mean when
you say police can lie?" he asks a Park Hill neighbor. "And how do we
deal with that? Not every officer is the same."
When a page is full, he rips it off the oversized
notepad and tapes it to the back wall. On one page, he reminds his audience of
the three potential stages of police interaction: "conversation,
detainment, arrest." He jots down their lists of perceived police
transgressions, essentially the all-caps message "COPS CAN LIE,"
followed by three bullet points: "cover tracks," "crime
pays," "entrapment" — to which he adds "Be
respectful." On a fifth page, he writes the number for the CPC's
racial-profiling hotline.
But before a situation gets to the point where
people feel they have to use the number, Landau suggests trying some magic
phrases — phrases he then acts out in a series of sketches: "Have I done
something wrong, officer?," "Am I free to go?," "I do not
consent to this search," "I'd like to speak to an attorney" and
"I'd like to remain silent." At the end of the lecture, he and the
evening's two other organizers ask audience members to write their goals for a
better Denver — anything from "community gardens" to "more
stoplights" — on a piece of colored paper shaped like a leaf; together
these goals will create a "vision tree."
As participants step forward to announce their
hopes and attach their leaf to the tree, CPC racial-justice director Mu Son Chi
remembers the people whose lives were cut short. Paul Childs, Alonzo Ashley,
Marvin Booker: three men whose names, like that of Alex Landau, have come to
mean something to the community for all the wrong reasons. And when the tree
has grown to full size, Landau finally adds his own entry, taping a yellow leaf
down near the base.
It reads, "Satisfactory police
discipline."
Over the past few months, anti-police-brutality
marches and rallies have grown more commonplace in Denver, with actions
splitting the focus between national names (Trayvon Martin) and local ones (Marvin
Booker, Alex Landau). The CPC and Colorado ACLU had a "Summer Against
Police Violence" message ready to release last month, but postponed it for
a few weeks out of respect for fallen DPD officer Celena Hollis. On July 18, the CPC will
host a vigil with the family of Alonzo Ashley.
While Landau waits for the feds to finish their
investigation and perhaps deliver some satisfactory police discipline, some
doubt he'll ever really get it. "Closure for Alex would be knowing that
people can't do this to him," Holland says. "The public has told him
this is unacceptable, and the city has told him that, but the police
department's deliberation is causing him concern."
"If, right now, we had the finish of the DOJ
investigation and it gave us nothing, we'd be done," Martinez says.
"But I don't know if this community will ever really get resolution on
this."