Denver police did not effectively track their use of less-than-lethal projectiles and often did not promptly create use-of-force reports during last spring and summer’s protests prompted by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a watchdog report finds.

The Denver Police Department also did not create officer rosters of those assigned to the first four days of protests, nor have body-worn camera footage for many officers, according to the report.

The Denver City Council in June had requested the review of the DPD response by the Office of the Independent Monitor. The report by independent monitor Nick Mitchell, released Tuesday morning, said these issues hindered a thorough analysis of use of force during the protests.

“DPD command personnel could have reviewed tracking logs to determine whether certain teams or officers were exhausting supplies of munitions at disproportionate rates and contemporaneous use of force statements to determine whether force was being used in compliance with policy,” states the report. “The deficient internal controls were a missed opportunity for greater managerial oversight of use of force by the DPD.”

The report also makes 16 recommendations for the DPD’s management of protests and other crowd-control situations in the future.

The report acknowledges that the DPD has succeeded before, such as during protests surrounding the 2008 Democratic National Convention, in balancing protesters’ First Amendment rights with maintaining public order, defending property and protecting people from injury when possible. But the report says the key difference between those earlier events and the May-June protests is that past protests were not about policing or the criminal justice system.

“The challenges presented by policing mass protests are magnified exponentially when the demonstrations concern police conduct itself,” the report said.

Denver’s independent monitor to release investigation next week on police response to protests

Missing footage and rosters

The report identifies at least 112 officers assigned to the protests on June 1 for which the department could not produce body-worn camera footage, using that date as an example because the DPD did not create officer rosters for May 28 through May 31. The document discussed a lack of specific guidance in DPD policy for body-worn camera usage during crowd control situations and no discussion of activation in the department’s Crowd Management Manual as possible reasons for missing body-worn camera footage.

“This may have created confusion for officers about whether to activate their BWCs during the chaos of the protests, and if so, when,” the report stated.

The report also notes some officers weren’t able to attach body-worn cameras to their protective gear, and that the department’s body-worn camera policy didn’t require all detectives, lieutenants, captains, commanders or chiefs to wear body-worn cameras.

According to the OIM report, about 28% of officers assigned to the protests on June 1 were lieutenants, captains, commanders or detectives. Current police department policy requires all officers of sergeant rank and below to wear cameras.

Officers have to activate their cameras during “any encounter that becomes adversarial” and “any situation that the officer believes the use of BWC would be appropriate or would provide valuable documentation if not already activated per policy.”

The report acknowledges the chaos and the size of the protests initially catching the DPD off guard and made it difficult for the department to create an officer roster for the first day of protests, May 28. But the report goes on to say the OIM believes the police department could have created a roster for the next three days.

The report says the OIM received varying answers from different command staff members about the number of officers who worked each of the first four days of protests, and officer numbers in after-action reports by the DPD included both Denver officers and those from other departments called in for help with protest response.

In response to these findings, the report recommended the DPD amend its Operations and Crowd Control Manuals to require creating rosters for officers assigned to crowd-control situations and for all officers regardless of rank to wear body-worn cameras while working in the field at protests.

Reporting delays

According to the report, officers sometimes prepared Use of Force statements more than 12 days after the corresponding incidents. The DPD turned over more than 400 Use of Force statements from officers assigned to the Citywide Impact Team, Districts 1 through 6, the Gang Unit, Metro/SWAT and Traffic Operations.

The report states the DPD’s Crowd Management Manual does not mention use-of-force reporting in crowd-control situations.

According to the report, recurring issues with officers’ Use of Force statements included repeating narratives verbatim each day they worked, short and vague descriptions of the circumstances leading to use of force and some officers expressing discomfort with creating an incident narrative so long after the fact given the chaos of the protests.

“These issues seriously limited the utility of these statements in evaluating individual uses of force to determine whether or not they were compliant with DPD policy,” says the report.

The report recommends amending the DPD’s Operations and Crowd Control Manuals to include specific requirements for reporting and reviewing use of fore during crowd-control situations.

In a November interview with the Denver Gazette, Police Chief Paul Pazen had said since June, the DPD has added new questions to use-of-force reports for providing information on de-escalation techniques an officer used in a situation. 

In the same interview, he said Denver has been accepted into Project ABLE, or Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement. Project ABLE trains law enforcement on peer intervention, and is intended to create agency cultures in which officers step in when needed to prevent their colleagues from causing harm or making mistakes.

“We can learn not only from our mistakes, but also mistakes that happen across the country, and analyze what worked; what went wrong; how can we make sure that this doesn’t have tragic consequences at the end,” Pazen told the Denver Gazette. “And we’re continuing to do that now to include the ABLE training.”

Verbal warnings

The report noted some camera footage showed officers using non-lethal projectile rounds on protesters who did not appear to be resisting physically. Existing law does not allow officers to disperse protests “because they simply fear possible disorder,” says the report.

The OIM found officers did not consistently follow DPD policy for issuing verbal warnings before firing non-lethal rounds to disperse protesters. According to the report, the monitor heard verbal orders to disperse in a “minority” of “dozens” of situations when officers used non-lethal rounds during the protests.

The report also states verbal warnings sometimes did not advise protesters of dispersal routes or warn them not complying could subject them to force or arrest. Officers sometimes did not provide enough time and space for protesters to comply with verbal commands, says the report.

The report recommended that during future protests, DPD supervisors give multiple verbal orders for crowds to disperse when possible before using force.

Mitchell is slated to present his findings to the Denver City Council’s safety committee on Wednesday and later that day will hold a two-hour online public forum hosted by the Citizen Oversight Board, which will include a question-and-answer session.

A statement from Denver’s Citizen Oversight Board said the report’s findings are “extremely troubling.” COB chair  Al Gardner said in the statement the report raises questions about what characterizes an appropriate use of force in response to protests and merits a close look at defining institutional accountability.

“These are military-grade munitions being used against citizens expressing their First Amendment rights,” Gardner said. “The COB is committed to working alongside the DPD and the Department of Public Safety to examine ways our city can be better prepared to peacefully police mass protests in the future.

“While we support the police in their efforts to provide orderly paths to protest, we do not believe that law enforcement or the preservation of order should ever come at the expense of transparency or accountability.”

In preparing the report, Mitchell’s staff reviewed “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of hours of police body-worn camera footage, street security camera footage, helicopter videos, cell-phone footage, audio records, officer statements, crowd dispersal orders, and records of officer training and less-lethal equipment dispersed.

Both Pazen and Public Safety Executive Director Murphy Robinson have said earlier that they supported the investigation.

“We in no way, shape or form are justifying inappropriate actions by our officers, and we will fully hold our team accountable for those actions,” Pazen pledged June 17, when he and Robinson were called in to address DPD’s use-of-force policy publicly in front of Denver City Council’s safety committee following protests.

Independent monitor to investigate police response to protests