By Chhun Sun
The Gazette
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — A few weeks before the end of 2015, the Colorado Springs Police Department organized an employee expo. It lasted a couple nights. Officers and their families were invited to have some food and talk about what was on their minds — not long after they experienced two horrific mass shootings that claimed seven lives in a span of 28 days.
The officers were rattled, changed.
And Police Chief Peter Carey was there to listen, learn, and understand.
“When we go through things,” he said, “we go through things together.”
2015 was a year highlighted by the aforementioned mass shootings, a discrimination lawsuit against the department, two officers-involved court cases and an internal affairs investigation detailing a police officer’s actions during a traffic stop of a black man. The city had 26 homicides, three more than the year before. And those events will be on the minds of Carey and his officers as they move forward in 2016.
This month marks the start of Carey’s fifth year as the head of the Colorado Springs Police Department - part of a law enforcement career that started in 1982. He says he’s not ready to retire, though he has thought about it. He says he has a few things to finish first.
His focus this year seems to be the department’s body-worn camera program.
In September, police were awarded a $600,000 grant to purchase the equipment. The grant required the department to match the funding to cover the cost of the program for two years. The department hopes to have 50 to 100 officers wear the body cameras in April, with all 471 officers equipped by October. A pilot program was completed, and the department is in the process of choosing a vendor and finalizing an internal policy code.
Such national stories as the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014 encouraged the department to look into bringing body-worn cameras in. In that case, witness accounts conflicted with what the officer said happened.
Body-worn cameras, Carey argues, could bring accountability to an officer’s day-to-day activities.
“I think that’s a good thing,” he said during a sit-down interview with The Gazette last month. “I think the details of having good, sound policy when an officer turns on and off the camera, how they share that information. I think they’re important ,and I think they help guarantee a good balance the benefits of accountability and individual’s privacy rights, and I think that’s always the balance we’re striving for.”
In the conversation, Carey also touched on the department’s Community Impact Teams making 500 felony arrests and seizing nearly $750,000 in stolen property and $300,000 in drugs. “So they were very, very effective,” he said.
But one thing was clear: Last year, as he put it, was extremely busy and challenging.
For example:
- Twelve female officers filed a discrimination lawsuit in April seeking to bar the Police Department from enforcing physical testing protocols and monetary damages for earning opportunities after the women failed the test. In November, the city of Colorado Springs and the Police Department agreed that officers were not required to take the test this year and those who failed no longer faced penalties. The outcome of the lawsuit is pending.
- An internal investigation suggested that an officer might have escalated a March 25 traffic stop involving Ryan Brown, who said he did not know why he was stopped. He was pulled from his vehicle by the officer and pushed to the ground. He believed he was racially profiled. Ultimately, the complaint was dismissed by the District Attorney’s Office.
- Two officers were caught up in court cases. Sgt. Bradley Pratt returned to work after he was acquitted in August of entering his ex-girlfriend’s house without her permission, and former police detective Paul Patton is awaiting sentencing after he pleaded guilty of attempting to influence a public servant and official misconduct while investigating a kidnapping and allegedly sleeping with the victim.
“When complaints are made against the Colorado Springs Police Department, I hope the takeaway in the community is that officers are held accountable for their actions,” Carey said. “They’re well-trained and we’re a transparent police department. I believe the takeaway should be that when complaints are brought into the police department, we look at them objectively and thoroughly and we make a finding. And if in some cases an officer did something wrong, we hold them accountable.”
Besides those cases, two mass shootings happened toward the end of the year made it hard on the Police Department. The first one was Oct. 31, when investigators said Noah Harpham, 33, shot and killed three people in downtown Colorado Springs before he died in a shootout with police. Then, on Nov. 27, suspected gunman Robert Lewis Dear Jr. allegedly killed three people, including a University of Colorado at Colorado Springs police officer, in a shooting at the city’s lone Planned Parenthood clinic. He surrendered to police.
“I think when you look at some of the very high-profile situations that we handled, we have to recognize there were times when we can’t handle each situation as one police department,” Carey said. “We have to depend on other people to assist us, that comes from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, many police departments, and I think we all came together as first responders to render medical aid to proper investigation. I think that’s one of the first things that I learned.”
Copyright 2016 The Gazette