Last June, a Denver task force led and controlled by the community was formed in response to the upswell of protests over police violence.

The goals of the Task Force to Reimagine Policing and Public Safety were to increase oversight and transparency of law enforcement, minimize interactions with police and the court system, and increase the role that people most impacted by law enforcement have in oversight, training and policy creation. The task force plans to finalize its report with an initial set of recommendations at the end of March. 

“What we want to do is not just come up with a set of recommendations. We want to actually tell a story about how a community becomes empowered, how a community takes ownership of its public safety, how we minimize police and citizen interaction, and how we keep people out of jail,” said Pastor Robert Davis, the task force’s leader. “And so each one of the recommendations helps us to tell a part of that story.” 

The task force has included representation from 43 community organizations and government agencies, including City Council, the district attorney’s office, the state public defender and Denver’s Office of the Independent Monitor.

According to a progress report compiled in February, the task force has been refining a preliminary list of 127 recommendations.  

The task force has come up with seven questions to compare each recommendation against:  

Davis said the task force also has been determining which agencies would need to be partners for implementing each recommendation, such as City Council, Denver Public Schools, the judiciary and the state. 

The task force has not made any of its draft recommendations public.  

But District 9 Councilmember Candi CdeBaca, who has participated in task force meetings, said complaints she has heard from constituents about policing tend to be about fundamental details of everyday interactions, such as officers clearly identifying themselves and trouble getting requested records from the department. She said people still also often voice their desire for transformative structural changes, like creating alternatives to police responses in some situations in a way that redefines the roles police play. 

“It’s still very consistent with what we were hearing during the protests and during the summer. I think now it’s just actually getting fleshed out,” she said. 

CdeBaca said the task force hearing from experts in cities outside Denver – such as on the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Ore., that sends pairs of medics and crisis workers as responders to some situations instead of police – has helped the task force understand how to translate demands for change into policy recommendations.  

“I think it was really inspiring to the group, because the group had very high-level demands of the police, but those presentations helped them figure out at a policy level how detailed and specific we should be getting.“ 

Denver has piloted a program, called the Support Team Assisted Response, that sends pairs of paramedics and mental health clinicians as responders to nonviolent situations, such as mental health crises, in place of police officers. The program is an example of what Davis says is a necessary link between police funding and rethinking the roles they play in society.  

Coming to a clear understanding of what police are expected to do has to happen before having conversations about funding police, he said. Davis said police’s roles have been too vaguely defined, which has led to the expectation for police to play myriad roles in addition to fighting crime. 

“If you ask city officials, if you ask police officers, ‘What are you supposed to be doing?’ You’ll get different answers, even from among the top brass,” he said.  

“So rather than ‘defund,’ let’s focus on what we’re supposed to be doing. And then once we identify that, let’s give them all the resources they need to do that. We have never, as a society, articulated what it is the police [should be] doing. Not just in Denver, but across the nation.”  

When 911 in Denver receives a call, dispatchers make a decision about whether to send out police or STAR. Data collected during the first six months of the program has shown promising results, with none of the situations STAR responded to requiring police officers or leading to arrests. 

Davis said he wants to see Denver take more interest in applying the model of STAR to developing alternatives to police responses in other types of situations, such as homelessness and addiction.  

District 2 Councilmember Kevin Flynn, who said he attended the task force’s meetings initially but decided he shouldn’t be part of developing recommendations that will then be presented for him to consider, sees programs like STAR freeing up police resources so they can focus on fighting crime as a good thing.

But he has seen officers in his district take genuine interest in outreach to people in crisis, such as helping people who are unhoused find resources to get off the street. So he doesn’t think police’s role in outreach work should be eliminated.   

“And so to say the police should have nothing to do with outreach to our homeless population, I think, that’s not something I would that I would put a wall between, because I’ve seen our officers be very compassionate and very treat people with dignity.“ 

He said from a policy perspective, reforming the culture of policing in Denver should start in officer recruiting and training that focuses on relating to the public and building relationships in communities.  

“It takes a while to build a new culture in a force that is 1500 officers, give or take. But it happens,” Flynn said. “This is not the same police department it was in 1962, when 50 of them went to prison for being in a burglary ring together. … This is not the same department.“ 

But the task force has an elephant in its Zoom meeting room: The absence of representatives from Denver’s Department of Safety and law enforcement. Public Safety Director Murphy Robinson withdrew DOS and law enforcement representation from the task force in January. In claims made to The Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics that Davis has disputed, Robinson said members of his team were asked not to actively participate in meetings and only answer questions. Robinson said that request stifled diversity of thought. 

Davis disputed that characterization in January. He said safety officials were only asked to skip one meeting earlier that month so community members could freely share their ideas on policing and public safety and what they believed should be the direction of the task force without concerns about retaliation. 

The task force progress report says representatives of the Denver Police Department were “exemplary in their engagement and dedication to our shared goal.” But the report also cites the Department of Safety and law enforcement’s withdrawal from the task force as a challenge for the task force.  

Davis told The Denver Gazette in another interview he believes the law enforcement agencies ultimately were uncomfortable with not having control to set the task force’s agenda.

But he said the task force has been structured to be community-controlled because community members just have the power to recommend policy changes, not actually implement them. He said it doesn’t make sense for the bodies with power to implement changes to also make their own recommendations, because they could cherry-pick what they say the community wants.