The spring of 2020 was an extraordinary time for Colorado’s legislature. The pandemic forced lawmakers to break for two months as they worked out safety procedures, and when they finally returned to the state capitol at the end of May, it was with the goal of fulfilling their constitutional duty to balance the budget and also respond to the pandemic.
But the day before lawmakers reconvened, George Floyd was killed by police officers in Minneapolis. His brutal death, caught on video, touched off immediate protests across the country, and in Denver.
“I felt the energy from the crowd. I felt energy from people just really wanting Colorado to be different, really wanting Colorado to step up and do something,” recalled Leslie Herod.
At the time, Herod was a state representative from Denver. Days into the protests, she and other Democrats addressed protesters from the steps of the state Capitol and promised to make significant reforms to policing in Colorado. She remembers feeling the weight of that moment.
“We will not rest,” she said to chants and applause. “Not only until this bill is passed, but until every single law enforcement officer who harms or kills our community is taken out of office and put in jail.”
The bill they introduced passed with broad bipartisan support and could only be described as sweeping. And it moved fast — just weeks after Herod unveiled it to protesters outside the Capitol, Gov. Jared Polis signed it into law under the building’s golden dome.
It incorporated reforms and accountability measures drawn not just from the George Floyd case, but also from two recent police deaths in Colorado: Elijah McClain and De’Von Bailey. Among other things, the law:
- required all law enforcement agencies to equip their officers with body cameras and use them in most interactions with the public;
- banned carotid chokeholds;
- raised the threshold for situations where officers can use deadly force;
- changed Colorado’s ‘fleeing felon’ law to limit when police can shoot at someone running away from them;
- allowed courts to hold officers personally liable for willful misconduct, with penalties up to $25,000;
- and required police departments to report all use-of-force incidents resulting in bodily injury or death to a state agency — including demographic information about the person who was injured or killed, the type of force used, as well as the officer’s name who was involved.
Herod believes the law could not have passed without the protests, which lawmakers could hear loud and clear echoing throughout the Capitol’s marble floors and rotunda. Throngs of people protested just steps below the large windows in the House chamber that overlook the Capitol grounds.
“I truly, truly, truly truly believe that, because people were so engaged, because they were out there chanting day and night, and it became, quite frankly, it became the soundtrack of the session was ‘Black Lives Matter,’ that we were able to get that bill passed,” she said.
Former Sen, Bob Gardner, a Republican from Colorado Springs, worked closely with Herod for countless hours to shape the bill into something he thought the GOP could support.
“That would not cause law enforcement to be just on the street without being able to protect themselves and at the same time having accountability. And that’s always been the struggle in policing in America,” he said.
Even though it moved quickly, Senate Bill 217, titled “Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity,” had lots of contentious elements for lawmakers to work through — like how to handle the data collection and privacy concerns associated with body cameras. But the most controversial piece was eliminating qualified immunity in cases of officer misconduct. Gardner said some people in law enforcement told him he betrayed them by allowing that to remain in the bill, and he understands the pushback.
“Don’t ever forget that every deputy, every officer who goes on duty, doesn’t know what that shift will hold for them, and what decision they’ll have to make and what decision they’ll have to make in a split second,” he said, noting that they have their own family and friends who worry, “Probably saying to them, ‘I don’t care what you do or how you do it, just come home safely.’”
Gardner said he’s proud of his work and glad not just that the bill passed, but that it had so much Republican support. He thinks over the subsequent five years there’s been an adjustment and a sort of acceptance among law enforcement. He points to body cameras as an example — in many cases, they’ve helped law enforcement officers defend themselves against charges of excessive force. However, he said, body camera footage has also been crucial in revealing cases when officers used bad judgment and excessive force.
“I think conscientious law enforcement officers and leadership say that needs to be stopped. And so it has certainly — not just the legislation, but the whole thing — has caused a lot of soul searching, I think, in law enforcement about how they police and what sorts of policies they need to have.”
Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen of Monument describes the bill as an appropriate product of that unique moment in time. He stands by his yes vote, but said he’s unhappy that the law seems to have fed into things like the larger Defund the Police movement.
“We got to a place where there was broadly in the culture disrespect… for law enforcement and the laws. And that certainly wouldn’t have been an outcome I would’ve predicted or promoted.”
Lundeen recalls how the pandemic and the overall mood of the country factored into the policy discussion around the bill. The Capitol and surrounding monuments were defaced with graffiti, lower windows in the building were boarded up with plywood and parts of its granite façade were smashed with rocks. The state was easing out of its COVID stay-at-home restrictions, but was still largely in lockdown, and people were mostly at home.
It was a moment, he believes, of reckoning for many people.
“They were struggling with, ‘who am I? What does my life look like? What does my future look like? What does my family’s future look like?’” said Lundeen. “Across the board, regardless of social circumstance, regardless of financial circumstance, regardless of demographic circumstance, I think everybody was on their heels trying to just process, what is the culture of my life? What is the culture in which I’m living in, at this moment?”
George Floyd’s death wasn’t the first to inspire changes in Colorado policing
While 2020 ushered in the most sweeping police reform policies the state has ever passed, it wasn’t the first time lawmakers dialed in on the issue — or the first time they managed to find bipartisan agreement on reforms. Five years earlier, Colorado passed a number of police accountability measures through a split legislature, when Republicans controlled the Senate and Democrats controlled the House.
That 2015 session followed the deaths of Michael Brown, who was shot by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, who died after being placed in a chokehold by New York police. Those deaths also touched off nationwide protests during the first iteration of the Black Lives Matter movement, leading many states to contemplate police reforms.
“We did start seeing a lot more cases coming up, a lot more incidents occurring with police officers and police brutality. And that resulted in a slew of bills that we brought forward,” said former Democratic Rep. Joe Salazar who was in the legislature then.
He brought forward a bill to protect the right of private citizens to record police activity. It was among a number of policies that passed that session and became law. Lawmakers set up a grant program to help departments buy body cameras and increased training for officers in areas like unconscious bias and de-escalation techniques.
They also changed how Colorado handles fatal police shootings; instead of allowing a department to determine on its own if an officer’s use of deadly force was justified, those incidents must now be investigated by an outside agency.
However, other proposals that lacked bipartisan support failed to move forward, such as limits to the types of chokeholds officers could use, and reforms to the board that certifies officers.
A political shift in the wake of 2020
In recent years at the Capitol, the topic of law enforcement accountability has quieted down and not been a focal point of state policymaking. It’s also become an increasingly polarized issue.
Democratic House Assistant Majority Leader Jennifer Bacon of Denver said too often Black lawmakers who work on criminal justice issues are attacked and labeled as anti-police.
“I am Black. I am a representative of a Black district. I am somewhat articulate and an attorney,” she said. “I am Black Lives Matter. And Black Lives Matter automatically means that you hate cops, which automatically means you hate Blue Lives Matter, which automatically means you’re anti- everything cops do.”
Bacon said she’s worked hard to push back against that false narrative. This session she got a bill through with unanimous support to protect law enforcement whistleblowers who report internal misconduct within a department. It stemmed from a police officer who said she faced retaliation after she accused a colleague of sexually assaulting her. Bacon said holding law enforcement accountable for internal actions is an important part of public safety.
“If we cannot trust them within their own ranks, we cannot trust them in community.”
Bacon said she thinks that 2020 law, which passed before her time at the capitol, laid the groundwork for some in law enforcement to bring forward the types concerns addressed in her whistleblower bill.
“They’re questioning what responsibilities they have to each other within the profession. And then the sad part is they found out they were not protected either, and they wanted to fix that. So that is a demonstration of the impact of that law,” said Bacon.
But she said now that the height of the Black Lives Matter movement has passed, it’s an uphill battle to have the kind of conversations that made that 2020 reform law possible.
“Each year that’s further from George Floyd’s death, the steeper the climb is, with having to explain to people what it means to be disenfranchised, or what it means to me to restructure some of these systems. And so what terrifies me is, do we have to wait for someone else to die?”
Did the 2020 bill change policing?
People working on these issues say five years isn’t long enough to really determine the bill’s impact on policing. Salazar now works as an attorney representing individuals in cases against police officers and police departments for constitutional violations. He said the courts are still figuring things out.
“It is still a baby law and it’s all being fleshed out. I’m raising novel arguments under the law that still have not been ruled on by a court,” he said.
Several court cases have dealt with instances of qualified immunity and when it applies to law enforcement and when it doesn’t.
The law’s impact has been felt in police departments around the state.
A year after it passed, Attorney General Phil Weiser used powers the law gave him to enter into a consent decree with the city of Aurora, requiring it to change its approach to policing in a process that’s still ongoing.
And within the first year, district attorneys around the state used the law to charge five officers for failing to intervene to prevent misconduct by a colleague. Those cases included the beating of a man during an arrest in Aurora and an assault on an inmate in the Adams County jail. The law was also used to charge a number of officers involved with at the fatal shooting of Christian Glass in Clear Creek County.
But in spite of the reforms, the law has not delivered on one of its core promises: to bring down the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers. Colorado still has more police shootings per capita than nearly every other state, and they’ve only grown more frequent in the past five years.
For Herod, the 2020 bill’s main sponsor, while the work isn’t done, she said she’s seen positive changes. She thinks it’s harder for law enforcement officers who use excessive force to move around to different police departments and that body camera footage provides more transparency for the public.
Herod said she was surprised when, during a recent public event she was speaking at, a law enforcement officer providing security came up to her. He knew who she was and personally thanked her for her work on police accountability, saying she was bringing integrity back to their work.
“I was shocked,” she said. “I was blown away.” Herod said it shows that when it comes to policing and deciding how to keep people safe, and who should be protected, she doesn’t think it’s as easy as judging a book by its cover.
“I think a lot of us really have the same goals in mind. People just have to feel safe enough to express that.”
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