DENVER (KDVR) — Colorado law enforcement agencies are working to make improvements to abide by a sweeping police accountability bill that was signed into law last summer, following weeks of unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis officers.
But the implementation of this new law is creating more questions among law enforcement on how it should be done, and how it can be funded.
“Completely onboard with accountability, transparency,” Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said. “I mean our whole job is to build community trust right?”
Pelle says they are not looking to change the meat and intent of the new law, but hope they can collaborate with lawmakers on some tweaks that will clarify the language of how they go about making these changes.
“Reporting demographic information, and body camera when and when not to turn those on, those all depend on a word called ‘contact,’ and the word is not well defined,” Pelle said. “If you’re an officer, and I’m an officer, and we both contact someone, do we both turn in demographic information on that person, or just one of us?”
Pelle says he agrees with concepts like duty to intervene, but would like to see more specific language that would help clear up what officers need to do in scenarios where they are off-duty officers or outside their jurisdiction.
Another issue Pelle says they’re running into across the state: funding some of these initiatives.
“We just did a survey of all the police chiefs and sheriffs in Colorado, and 56% of them don’t have the funding to implement body-worn camera programs,” Pelle said.
Pelle says it will cost the Boulder County Sheriff’s Department $993,000 to replace some body cameras and increase their total. But a lot of the costs associated with these programs goes towards the servers needed to store hours of body camera footage, and the manpower needed to locate incidents on the footage, and redact certain sensitive medical information.
“We’ve used body camera images to hold our deputies accountable,” Pelle said in support of the concept. “We’ve filed charges, we’ve terminated employment, and we’ve used it a lot to unfound claims.”
Pelle says rural departments in particular are having a hard time coming up with funding for implementation, especially as cities and towns across the state are operating with fewer funds because of the pandemic.
Another area law enforcement hopes to strengthen is community partnerships.
“To help those with mental health issues, or having food issues or housing issues,” Lt. Chris Gulli with the Colorado Fraternal Order of Police said. “We’d also like to continue to direct mental health support services for peace officers and for the public.”
Gulli says there should be more funding or grants for these partnerships, pointing to co-responder programs like Denver’s STAR Program, where mental health professionals will dispatch to low-level 9-1-1 calls.
“We want to make sure that we can get the public into positions where incarceration is the completely the last resort,” Gulli said. “We would rather get people help.”