McKinzie Rees was a 25-year-old rookie at the Edgewater Police Department when she was first sexually assaulted by a fellow officer in an Uber.
It happened as she and fellow officer Nathan Geerdes, her superior, headed to a bar where she thought a number of other colleagues were meeting them for drinks. When Rees went to the bathroom at the bar, Geerdes followed her and assaulted her a second time.
Rees reported the assault to her supervisors, but she wasn’t taken seriously and faced retaliation from her fellow officers. Eventually, her duties were reassigned and she was labeled as “untruthful.” She told KUNC she was eventually blacklisted to the point that she had to leave law enforcement altogether.
“The minute that I started speaking out about retaliation, I was then retaliated against,” Rees said. “In law enforcement in general, once you start to speak out about misconduct in the good old boys club, you are then the target.”
While Rees was forced out, Geerdes was able to leave the Edgewater Police Department and get another job in the Black Hawk Police Department. Years later, in 2022, an investigation uncovered that Geerdes assaulted multiple women and was eventually fired from the new job. He pled guilty to unlawful sexual conduct and, earlier this month, was sentenced to four years of probation and barred from working in law enforcement.
After her experience, Rees wanted to do something to prevent this from happening to others, so she turned to the state legislature, where she worked with Rep. Leslie Herod to help craft a newly-introduced bill that would reform transparency and accountability around police misconduct.
“It does put a target on my back, but the way I see it is that I had already lost everything. I no longer had a career. I couldn't get rehired if I tried,” Rees told KUNC. “There has to be change, and if I was going to be the one to create change, then I was going to do everything in my power to ensure that what happened to me didn't happen to the next person.”
Herod said this year’s bill builds on the 2020 Police Accountability Act, which she also sponsored. The 2020 law focused on misconduct between police and the public, while this year’s legislation is focused on misconduct within departments, between officers.
“We had officers from Edgewater and Denver and other agencies across Colorado come to us and say ‘I was harmed within my agency, and something needs to change’,” Herod said. “I find this bill to be one that supports law enforcement, that protects law enforcement, and that encourages them to step up and blow the whistle when someone is breaking the law.”
Under the bill, if an officer is aware of “misconduct, criminal conduct, or other unprofessional conduct” of another officer, they would be required by law to report it to their agency or department. If they don’t, they could be charged with a class 2 misdemeanor.
There are currently no legal consequences if an officer fails to report internal misconduct. The 2020 measure made it a misdemeanor only if officers fail to intervene in police brutality or misconduct with members of the public.
The new bill would also require law enforcement agencies to conduct an investigation when they receive allegations of misconduct. If an agency fails to do so, the individual who brought the allegation would have a “private right of action,” meaning they can take legal action on their own. The bill would also remove immunity for law enforcement officers from legal recourse.
It would also add protections for whistle-blowers by giving them the right to take personal legal action against their department or agency if they face discipline or other retaliation for reporting misconduct.
Currently, law enforcement agencies have to post information about officers’ misconduct to a database under the Peace Officer Standards and Training, or POST, Board. The bill would expand the Attorney General’s office’s oversight of the database and require it to investigate when agencies fail to report.
“We have found that the bad officer database has been used to retaliate against officers who are whistleblowers,” Herod said. “The AG has no authority to audit the records of these agencies to make sure that people who deserve to be in the database, in fact are.”
The measure would also add new requirements around record retention. Law enforcement agencies don’t currently have to keep records of misconduct for any length of time. The bill would require those records to be retained for at least three years.
It would also prohibit law enforcement agencies from charging fees to release audio and video to the public, including bodycam and dashcam footage, and released footage would have to be unedited.
While the bill was brought by former and current officers like McKinzie Rees, members of law enforcement are also lining up in opposition to the bill. For example, the Colorado chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, the largest professional police organization in the state and the nation, opposes it.
“Everybody is going to have a different definition of what unprofessional conduct or misconduct is,” Mike Deedon, the Vice President of the group in Colorado. “Without it being listed and explained and defined, the legislation opens it up to interpretation, creating a slippery slope. What exactly are you going to be held accountable for?
The group is most concerned that because the bill does not define “unprofessional conduct”, it would cause confusion and superfluous misconduct reports. Deedon said such a broad term would make it unclear what officers are required to report or not.
Deedon also said the group would be more open to supporting the bill if it included more clear and targeted definitions of misconduct.
Republican Rep. Gabe Evans, a former Arvada police officer who is also running for Congress in the 8th District, argues the bill would create too much liability at a time when law enforcement officers are understaffed.
“This bill massively increases not only the criminal, but the civil liability to which officers are subjected,” Evans said. “It drops the quality of folks that we're going to be able to recruit and retain when they look at yet more liability that's going to require them to look over their shoulder to see if maybe, maybe I'm gonna get reported by my buddy.”
He said the bill would undermine trust within departments and discourage officers from confiding in each other and their superiors.
Evans also took issue with the bill’s timing and stakeholder. It was introduced with only about 20 days left in the legislative session, which Evans said isn’t enough time to properly debate the policy. He questioned why the bill’s sponsors didn’t engage with lawmakers who have law enforcement experience, like himself, or with the Fraternal Order of Police.
“I argue that they do not like law enforcement,” Evans said. “If we're actually honestly and sincerely trying to work collaboratively, and bipartisanly, in order to increase and strengthen the whistleblower protections for officers to be able to report a toxic chain of command, a toxic work culture or something like that, let's have that conversation.”
For McKinzie Rees, however, this bill is far from an attack on the police. For her, it’s about making law enforcement better.
“At the end of the day, this is a bill that me, current cops and former cop decided was a necessity,” Rees said. “It just needs to be known to people that it’s not this crazy agenda going after cops. This is cops looking at other cops because the thing that good cops hate most is a bad cop.”
After Rees came forward, the Jefferson County District Attorney started investigating the Edgewater Police Department in 2021 and, in 2022, requested that the Attorney General open an investigation into the department, which was “fraught with bullying, retaliation, and bending of the rules.”
