PHOTO: Attorney General Phil Weiser speaks at the 2022 Denver Metro Chamber candidate forum at the University of Denver, October 12, 2022. Photo by Carl Payne for Colorado Newsline.
This story by Susan Greene, Colorado News Collaborative, and Andrew Fraieli, The Sentinel in Aurora, appeared on Colorado Newsline on October 19, 2023. We are sharing, slightly abridged, it in two installments.
A Denver Police officer bragged to coworkers that he shot a carjacking suspect once in the head to kill him, then at least 16 times more to see his “face fall apart.” Coworkers told investigators that he spent months trumpeting his second on-duty killing and saying he was eager for a third.
Shane Madrigal resigned in 2022 while under investigation for what his supervisors deemed racist, homophobic and “grossly inappropriate” comments about killing people while he was on duty.
Yet the man colleagues say has “zero regard for human life” still has a clean disciplinary record with the Colorado Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) board, the state agency responsible for regulating police. In the eyes of the law, Madrigal — who denied any wrongdoing — remains qualified to keep serving in law enforcement.
He isn’t the only officer who is still certified despite a documented pattern of alarming misconduct.
“We had some terrible police in our community who’ve lost their jobs, but… are still able to find jobs elsewhere,” says Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola, a member of the POST board. “If we’re going to make law enforcement more professional, and if we’re going to make the state of Colorado more safe, we need to hold these people accountable.
“We have to be able to police our police.”
Reporters from the Colorado News Collaborative (COLab), Rocky Mountain Public Media, 9News, Colorado Public Radio and The Sentinel newspaper in Aurora used data made public by a 2020 reform law to take an unprecedented look at police discipline throughout the state. An investigation by COLab, The Sentinel and Rocky Mountain Public Media revealed a host of loopholes, mistakes and regulatory blind spots that have kept officers with documented records of abusive conduct in good standing with POST.
We found that cops involved in some of Colorado’s most-high profile misconduct cases — including Elijah McClain’s 2019 killing in Aurora — show up, falsely, in the state’s new police database with clean disciplinary records. We identified several who continued breaking policies and laws as they’ve been able to bounce from police job to police job. And only after we started asking questions about certain officers whose departments had months earlier reported their misconduct did the state take away their right to carry a badge in Colorado.
We also found:
POST’s practice of publicly disclosing disciplinary actions taken against police only since 2022 has shielded the identities of most cops with proven records of misconduct.
POST relies on local departments to report on their officers’ misbehavior, yet has not used its power to sanction those that don’t.
The Attorney General’s office says POST has no authority to investigate or discipline officers whose departments have ignored their misconduct, leaving no other state agency to do so.
And POST’s legal criteria for decertification are so narrow that it cannot decertify officers even when their records strongly suggest they are unfit for police work.
More than three years after state lawmakers vowed a new era of police accountability, our findings cast doubt on how much progress Colorado has made keeping the public safe from rogue cops.
“What kind of system allows the certification of an officer who takes pleasure in riddling people with extra bullets?” asks Trish Vigil, mother of the carjacking suspect whose fatal shooting Madrigal’s fellow officers say he gloated over. “That’s not police discipline. It’s a free pass. And it’s disgusting.”
Law enforcement officers need to be certified by POST, an arm of the state Attorney General’s office, to make arrests in Colorado. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the state started specifying the kinds of misconduct that would cause an officer to lose that status.
In 1992, the legislature directed POST to deny certification to any officer convicted of a felony. Eventually, convictions or plea deals for certain serious misdemeanors were added to the list. Those misdemeanors include assaults with weapons, sex assaults and offenses, harassment, sexually exploiting children, obstruction of justice, bias-motivated crimes and certain drug offenses.
But by far the biggest efforts to reform police discipline have come in the last four years, starting with a 2019 law that makes “untruthfulness” the first non-criminal reason for decertification.
“Peace officers make too many critical decisions to rely on the credibility of known liars,” says Michael Phibbs, at the time the chief of the Auraria Campus Police Department and chairman of the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police, which proposed the bill.
Since it passed, 53 officers statewide have lost their POST certification for falsifying criminal justice records, misrepresenting facts during internal affairs, administrative and disciplinary investigations, and/or lying under oath.
In 2020, Colorado made national headlines as a leader in police reform when lawmakers, responding to the outrage following McClain’s, George Floyd’s and other police killings, passed a landmark bill targeting law enforcement integrity. One provision of the sweeping reform package ordered POST to create a public database to, for the first time, flag officers who’ve lost their certification. It’s also supposed to record “disciplinary actions” against those found to have been untruthful or who become the subject of a criminal probe, those who resigned while under investigation, in lieu of termination, or get fired “for cause” — meaning for intentional wrongdoing or misconduct.
Colorado is 1 of 14 states with such a database.
State Rep. Leslie Herod (D-Denver) co-sponsored the reform package and says winning approval for the database was long considered “an insurmountable task” given years of opposition by powerful police unions that argued it would embarrass officers, breach their privacy and unfairly keep those who’ve lost their jobs from finding new ones.
“The key was to make sure these officers who were decertified wouldn’t get a job in another jurisdiction, and for people considering hiring them to understand the liability,” Herod says. “Against the odds, we achieved that.”
A year later, the Legislature began requiring departments to use the database to check job applicants’ disciplinary records. The assumption was that the information in the database would be complete and accurate.
It is neither. In an interview, Attorney General Phil Weiser acknowledged the system isn’t performing as envisioned and said his office is working to ensure local departments know their responsibilities when it comes to disciplining rogue cops.
“I will not say the system is perfect,” Weiser said. “I always believe there is room for improvement.”
The database is beset with glitches.
One crucial defect causes it to show a checkmark in a box reading “certification” for some officers who have been decertified. Another causes the word “CERTIFIED” to appear in capital letters next to the names of other officers who, further clicks into the database show, have lost POST certification.
POST says it has known about the malfunctions for about a year, but the office does not have a timeline — nor the budget — to fix them.
It lists dozens of officers as having been “terminated for cause,” for example, yet doesn’t say what the cause was. And although the database may indicate that an officer is “subject of criminal investigation,” it removes that language once the case is closed without, in most instances, indicating whether the officer has been convicted, and if so of which offenses.
“If it’s misconduct, it’s misconduct. It ought to be in there, no matter what the (severity) of crime,” says Samuel Walker, a professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who studies police accountability.
POST’s records are also frequently outdated. Some delays are legally necessary because of due process rights officers have in the decertification process, as well as a work backlog among POST’s staff. Other delays, we found, stem from confusion about POST’s reporting process, miscommunication between local law enforcement agencies and POST, and paperwork errors.
The effort to decertify Colorado State Patrol Sgt. Aaron Laing, for example, sat in 10 months of bureaucratic limbo after he was fired in November 2022 for materially changing dozens of case reports written by members of a Smuggling, Trafficking, and Interdiction Section (STIS) team he led, and then lying about those changes. Among them, documents show, he altered a report about a 2021 traffic stop by removing references to the involvement of an undercover Homeland Security Investigations vehicle driven by a special agent.
Laing refused to comment when we called. POST decertified him in September, after we asked about the delay.
It took POST nine months to decertify Officer Joseph Kanson, who worked for the Evans Police Department but never finished field training and was convicted and sentenced in January on charges of impersonating an officer and a public servant. POST revoked his certification in September — again, only after we asked about the hold-up.
Kanson, too, declined our invitation to discuss his case.
Alamosa Police Chief Ken Anderson says he has reported two of his now-former officers to POST for untruthfulness — misconduct that he assumed would have led to both being decertified. But in both cases, he says, his reports were snarled in bureaucracy and ignored by POST. Both officers remain certified, so any other law enforcement agency in the state is free to hire them.
“I feel like we’re following the rules and it’s frustrating if we’re not being listened to seriously,” Anderson says.
Quinten Stump was a Kiowa County sheriff’s deputy with a record of excessive force when, in April 2020, he took part in killing an unarmed man, Zack Gifford, with three bullets to the back. That shooting led Kiowa County to pay a $9.5 million civil settlement to Gifford’s family and a jury to convict Stump of attempted manslaughter. He is serving a three-year prison sentence at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility, yet, as of this writing, he is still POST certified.
POST would not comment on why that’s the case.
“It feels as though he’s still sort of getting away with it,” says Carla Gifford who, more than three years after her son’s killing, wonders how much longer her family will have to wait to hear Stump will never again work as a cop.