To open the third week of a trial in federal court over Denver police’s handling of the 2020 protests sparked by George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, the city began presenting its case that the Police Department had to scramble to respond to rapidly evolving demonstrations marked by unprecedented levels of anti-police sentiment and violence.

Defense attorneys for Denver began making their case Monday morning after the protesters suing called their last witness Friday afternoon.

The jury heard from Cmdr. Mike O’Donnell for most of the day, who has replaced retired Cmdr. Patrick Phelan as commander of the department’s special operations division. Phelan served as incident commander of the 2020 protests.

O’Donnell spent much of his time on the stand talking about incidents during the protests of people who were violent toward officers or caused property destruction and the safety threat he believed they posed to officers.

He said at a national debrief of the 2020 protests by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, Denver was used as an example of violence by demonstrators that went beyond levels in other cities. More than 70 officers were injured and millions of dollars of property damage was done.

“I just was astounded. I’ve never had any experience that could have prepared me for something like that,” O’Donnell said.

The excessive force lawsuit brought by a dozen protesters at the heart of the ongoing trial claims Denver failed to train officers for responding to the protests, leading to what the group of protesters suing says were dangerous and indiscriminate use of less-lethal munitions and chemical agents to control crowds.

The less-lethal characterization has been criticized because weapons that fire kinetic projectiles can cause serious injury or death.

Response to George Floyd protests drew criticism from some in Denver police’s leadership ranks, former monitor says

The Police Department has been criticized for using force against whole crowds rather than isolating individual people who were behaving violently for appropriate force or arrest. O’Donnell said the Police Department’s policies teach officers to evaluate whether actions they might take against individual people are likely to make the situation better or escalate it. Because the George Floyd protests were directed at police, sending officers into crowds to arrest people breaking laws likely would have inflamed the situation further, he said.

“I can’t stress enough that you have to have a lot of flexibility when you’re employing crowd management,” he said.

O’Donnell said the Police Department’s training on spontaneous situations is similar to that for planned events. In unplanned circumstances, police in command positions try to identify the event’s leaders. He said during the George Floyd protests, leadership tried to get in touch with community leaders in several instances to find out their intentions on a given day, but said those efforts were unsuccessful.

Last week the city’s former police monitor said on the stand that some mid-level commanders in the Police Department believed officers received insufficient crowd control training.

Nick Mitchell, who led Denver’s Office of the Independent Monitor until early 2021, prepared dozens of memos based on interviews of officers during an investigation his office did into the police response to the George Floyd protests.

According to one OIM memo, Sgt. Eric Knutson – the department’s chief crowd control trainer – watched video of the George Floyd protests and said in his opinion, “some of the formations that were being used were nothing that I have ever trained on.”

In particular he believed officers relied too much on pepperballs – munitions that release a chemical irritant when they explode – and should have been encouraged to use riot batons.

Pepperballs shouldn’t be fired at people but instead at the ground to disperse crowds, he said.

‘A sweeping failure of leadership’: Former Seattle police chief condemns Denver’s tactics during 2020 protests

The OIM released a report in fall 2020 that found police used force against people who were not showing physical aggression toward officers, fired munitions at people’s heads, faces and groins – all prohibited parts of the body – and continued deploying chemical agents after crowds dispersed. It also found officers often didn’t prepare use-of-force reports until days or weeks after the fact.

The office discovered during its investigation that officers frequently didn’t activate their body-worn cameras during the protests, making identifying officers in force incidents difficult. The department has said officers ran into problems fixing the cameras to their body armor.

The training academy no longer trains on less-lethal weapons or their tactics in crowd management, according to an interview memo prepared from a conversation with academy Lt. John Coppedge. Training and inventory tracking was passed to the department’s individual districts.

And in 2016 commanders stopped sending officers to a three-day field force training class developed by Knutson because it put a strain on manpower, according to the memo prepared from Knutson’s interview. The course trained officers on formations, choreography and communication signals during crowd control situations.

Knutson developed a one-day leadership course for field force training to replace the previous training to reduce the manpower drain. While supervisors thought it was a good refresher, the shortened course didn’t give them the chance to actually run through formations with officers, according to the memo. At the time it was the only field force leadership training supervisors got.

O’Donnell said officers working the protests not assigned to the special operations unit weren’t all familiar with field force movements and commands, presenting a challenge for directing them.

“So when you say move forward and half step, a lot of the officers – especially the first night that were not assigned to the gang unit – were unfamiliar, hesitant, fearful,” he said. “So that was a challenge for us.”

Protesters take stand in first day of testimony in trial over police response to 2020 demonstrations