In the wake of multiple high-profile cases involving Aurora police, several elected officials met Saturday with members of the Aurora Police Department and District Attorney’s Office during a town hall to discuss the state of policing and public safety within the city.

Sen. Rhonda Fields, alongside fellow Democrats Reps. Janet Buckner and Mike Weissman, hosted the Saturday morning event during which Aurora police Division Chief Vanessa Wilson and Assistant District Attorney Matt Maillaro fielded heated questions from a frustrated audience.

The panel also was helmed by Denise Maes, public policy director of the Colorado branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Aurora City Councilwoman Nicole Johnston, who announced Friday a plan to create a new independent review board for examining officer-involved shootings.

The conversation, held at Aurora’s Mission Viejo Library, focused on how police determine a need for deadly force.

Policing undoubtedly face a difficult job, Fields acknowledged, but she wondered why encounters with law enforcement often resulted in a “dead, black body.”

One of the most recent examples in Aurora, a case still pending investigation, involved the death of 23-year-old Elijah McClain – an African American male – after he encountered police on Aug. 24 while on his way home from buying four cans of Brisk tea at a gas station in Aurora.

Officers put McClain, a Denver native and massage therapist in Aurora, in a chokehold and forced him on the ground for 15 minutes, where he was then injected with the sedative ketamine, according to a Sentinel Colorado report of the encounter. McClain apparently suffered a heart attack, fell into a coma and died once taken off life support on Aug. 30. 

The McClain family’s civil rights lawyer, Mari Newman, has claimed the police body camera footage is incomplete. All three officers’ body cameras were dislodged, she told the Sentinel , and pointing in the wrong direction during the arrest.

A family friend and co-worker of McClain’s, April Young, said during the town hall that an officer can be heard in the footage telling another to “Move your camera, dude,” a detail also claimed by Newman.

The footage has not been released to the public because the investigation is ongoing.

Division Chief Wilson explained that although the dislodged cameras may seem “dubious in some ways,” that’s not the case.

Often, shoddy body camera footage is a matter of a technology failure, Wilson said, and that the police department is currently looking for better ways to prevent body cameras from dislodging or malfunctioning.

The ACLU and others have filed several lawsuits over the years against the City of Aurora over officer-involved shootings, and the city has had to cough up millions of dollars as a result.

“There is a pattern here that is disturbing,” Maes said .   

The organization, alongside others, has long advocated for an independent authority to monitor police shootings, and Maes was “not sure why the City of Aurora has resisted.”

Aurora City Councilwoman Johnston plans to pursue plans for an independent review system either through a council ordinance or a ballot initiative and will be seeking input from stakeholders, including police officers, before introducing one of those two proposals within the next six months.

“I find our community is frustrated,” Johnston said, but she hopes putting in place a system that provides more transparency and oversight will help ease those grievances.

Johnston has looked at models in other cities across the country, including Denver, but said she has not yet found the exact right model for Aurora.

Maes said creating an independent authority is “certainly a good approach,” compared to the independent review board that Aurora currently has in place, which hasn’t met in over a year and reviews certain cases only when asked by law enforcement.

In Colorado, police officers can face criminal charges if found to have used excessive force. Other officers also are required to report excessive use by other officers.

Roughly about 20 cases in the last five or six years have resulted in Aurora police officers being charged with crimes, Assistant District Attorney Matt Maillaro said.

As an effort to keeps cops accountable, bipartisan legislation sponsored by Fields and signed into law by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis earlier this year now bans police officers who lie on record from serving in Colorado.  

But the panel acknowledged there is much more work to be done moving forward.

 “I think it’s clear the community wants answers,” Wilson said. “I hear the anger and the frustration and the sorrow in this room … and I am here today because we do care.”

Wilson said the police department is actively listening to the community and legislators, is eager to do better and remains open to the independent review proposal spearheaded by Johnston.

The Colorado Sun reports that Democratic Rep. Leslie Herod and Polis are considering in the upcoming legislative session a way to reassess who investigates police-involved shootings and how independent they should be.

NOTE: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Denise Maes’ name.