Denver's Bad Boy Cops by Christopher N. Osher
Denver's Bad Boy Cops by Christopher N. Osher© 2007 Denver Post
Reproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.
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August 19, 2007 — The Denver police force includes an officer found to have held a cocked gun to his wife's head, another who pushed a pregnant teen into concrete stairs, then placed his knee on her belly, and another with 21 disciplinary actions against him and 50 total complaints.
A review of court and Police Department records, some of which have never before been made accessible to the public, also shows the city has allowed officers convicted of drunken driving to remain on the force.
At least 25 officers remained on the force from January 1997 through September 2006 after they were punished for what the department calls “departure from the truth.” In some other police departments, such a complaint, if sustained, can lead to immediate dismissal because it can be used by defense lawyers in criminal cases to challenge an officer's court testimony.
And the force also has persistent repeat offenders. Of 16 officers with 10 or more sustained complaints against them in the time period, only one has been fired. Three of those repeat offenders resigned, and one retired during that time.
It's all part of a discipline system top city officials say is broken and in need of a complete overhaul. Long-standing rules at the city require safety officials to consider past discipline when they impose new sanctions. That means the current administration feels bound by the decisions made by past, more lenient administrations.
In a recent federal court case, Al LaCabe, the city's safety manager, who is in charge of overseeing the Police Department, said not enough written guidelines exist for disciplining officers. He said the “comparative discipline” rule has backfired and caused numerous inconsistencies and problems.
“In my experience as a manager, I have come to learn that there are certain systems in the Police Department and certain ways discipline is handed out which are somewhat inconsistent and leads to what I call sometimes inconsistent results,” LaCabe said.
LaCabe, who has formed a committee that is undertaking a two-year review of the discipline system, said this is the year he hopes to initiate reforms.
Denver police Officer Karl Coleman is the discipline record holder at the department since 1997. He has been investigated on 50 internal offenses and disciplined at least 21 times for departmental violations, including his guilty plea following a May 2002 drunken-driving collision, a search of the department's discipline database shows. [Emphasis added.]
Court records show that during his one-year probation, he once appeared for his court-ordered alcohol counseling with alcohol on his breath.
Coleman, who declined to comment, is now working at headquarters answering telephones.
According to court records, Officer Stanley Valverde amassed 26 separate disciplinary actions before the city finally fired him.
Valverde pulled his gun and pointed it at a motorist during a road-rage incident January 26, 2000, records show.
In May 2000, while directing traffic, Valverde pulled his gun again on another motorist attempting to negotiate a confusing cone barricade. When that motorist asked why, Valverde said, “I do it because I can,” according to testimony.
Two months later, with the other cases pending, he committed what became the final straw when he committed bigamy by marrying a woman during a drunken trip to Las Vegas. At the time, he was married to another woman.
Those officers and 13 others with similarly long internal discipline histories were allowed to remain on the force despite years of infractions.
Police Department officials say part of the reason repeat offenders slipped by is that LaCabe only recently started reviewing cases that didn't involve a suspension or termination. Department supervisors, who previously were able to mete out discipline for some classes of offenses, tended toward leniency.
Now the department's new independent monitor, Richard Rosenthal, who reviews police internal-affairs investigations, flags cases for LaCabe that he deems worthy of stiffer punishment or further investigation.
Denver police Officer Keith Spooner drove his squad car the wrong way down an alley in Lower Downtown during the early-morning hours of December 17, 2003, and took offense at Kevin Larson, the marketing director of a nightclub, who was going the correct way down the alley, a hearing officer found.
Spooner reached inside Larson's car and dragged him out, screaming epithets and placing Larson's left arm in a twist.
Spooner, still holding Larson in a twist lock, led him to the front of the squad car and, while yelling even louder, tried to force his head against it. Larson escaped injury by holding his hand out, blocking the impact.
“What the f--- do you call this if you didn't hit my car?” Spooner yelled, despite no visible damage to his car. The verbal assault continued with Spooner saying, “You know what? You make me want to kick your a** right here in this alley.”
Eventually, Spooner unsnapped his holster and withdrew his gun far enough for Larson to see it and said, “If you do something stupid, I'll f**king put a bullet between your f**king eyes.”
Spooner's supervisor, Division Chief Mary Beth Klee, recommended just a two-day suspension from the force. She also thought Spooner should have to work for free for two days. The punishment eventually was increased by her superiors to 120 days' suspension without pay.
Still, Spooner fought the suspension, even after he pled guilty in the case to a misdemeanor criminal charge of menacing.
Astonished, the hearing officer, David Hansen, upheld the suspension and noted that Spooner would not even have been eligible for hiring in Denver if he had committed the offense at another department before joining Denver's force.
Spooner, who remains on the force in the traffic division dealing with hazardous materials, did not return phone messages seeking comment.
The city's charter dictates that the city's Civil Service Commission, in reviewing an appeal of a disciplinary decision, must determine whether the punishment is “consistent with discipline received by other members of the department under similar circumstances.”
In 1998, the commission ruled there is no time limit to what past discipline it should consider in assessing appeals.
The case that prompted the ruling involved Officer Matthew Graves, who placed a gun to a handcuffed prisoner's head after he said she reached into her coat pocket while in a holding cell. Graves, who is now working in building maintenance at headquarters and is still an officer, argued that it was a minor blemish on an otherwise clean record.
He pled guilty to a misdemeanor assault, but since other officers with even more serious offenses had not been fired in the past, Graves got his job back.
LaCabe chafes at that ruling, arguing that society has changed from the 1980s, a time when the administration allowed police Officer Belt Harlan to remain on the force despite his guilty plea to prohibited use of a weapon after he was accused of pulling out a pistol during a dispute over a purchase at a Church's Fried Chicken.
Harlan, who also escaped firing even when he accidentally shot his wife and punched a man at a softball game, retired five years ago. But the way his cases were handled can live on in the department under the current rules.
Marc Colin, a lawyer who handles discipline appeals for officers, says his firm maintains a database of disciplinary decisions going back decades so he can use them in the comparative process. He said the commission's hearing officer gives less weight the farther back the lawyer goes, but even old cases can be relevant.
“If you can show that the last three chiefs of police have handled violations a certain way, you can argue that is relevant,” Colin said.
He said comparative discipline prevents favoritism for favored officers or unfair retaliation.
“It guards against racial bias and gender bias,” he said.
Detractors say it also protects officers who have committed serious offenses, with sometimes devastating consequences for the public.
Officer Damian Naranjo was suspended after he encouraged a woman outside the Baja Beach Club on March 15, 2001, to perform an exotic dance on a sidewalk, exposing her breasts and buttocks to him and other officers. Naranjo also was found to have used excessive force later that night while arresting a man.
Three years later, Naranjo resigned from the police force after a woman accused him of committing sexual assault during a police retirement party at a LoDo bar. No criminal charge was ever filed, and Naranjo's attorney said the resignation was not related to the assault allegation.
But the resignation did not come soon enough for David Nettles, who said he will never be the same after an encounter with Naranjo and Detective Michael Nuanes, another officer with a disciplinary history.
Nettles, now 54, said the two, along with a third officer, arrested him December 6, 2003, when they came to his neighborhood to arrest another man on an outstanding domestic-violence warrant.
Nettles, a 350-pound man who had a pacemaker for a heart blockage at the time of the arrest, said he was coming home from a night of playing chess at a friend's home when the officers confronted him and ordered him into his house.
He didn't move quickly enough for the officers, and what transpired left him with a wrongful conviction for resisting arrest, a federal lawsuit contends, and a shattered shoulder and a broken arm caused by officers' trying to force his arms into handcuffs too short for his girth.
Naranjo's attorney, Douglas Jewell, and city lawyers have argued in court papers that the lawsuit is without merit.
Nettles said he tried to warn the officers his hands wouldn't go behind his back for the cuffs, he pleaded with them to cuff him in the front and he told them he wasn't the man they wanted.
“We will get it,” he recalled the arresting officers saying. “Don't tell us what we can and can't do.” [Similar incidents have occurred since.]
“And then they got mad, and that's when the boots started kicking me in the face, kicking me in the head, and they were hitting me with something,” he later testified.
An officer jerked his right arm hard, according to his testimony, and he felt a snap like a “chicken bone.” They still couldn't get his arms back far enough, he recalled, and they jerked harder — harder and harder until he felt an explosion in his shoulder.
“Still they couldn't get it, get me cuffed,” he testified. “So then I heard another popping sound in my shoulder, and apparently that's when the whole thing just busted or shattered. You know that's when they got the cuffs on.”
Photos of the incident show it eventually took three handcuffs linked together to get Nettles' hands cuffed behind his back.
Richard Hathaway, a doctor who diagnosed Nettles, later wrote the following: “From this point on, I see him having a lifetime of chronic pain and difficulty with use of the right upper extremity.”
For Nettles, the injury means that he no longer can play catch with his grandchildren and that he must sleep on a recliner instead of in bed with his wife, Bessie. His arm is now filled with titanium, and he takes morphine three times a day. He said he no longer can shake hands.
“They ruined my life good,” he said. “They go like they're exempt from the law. 'We have the badge. We can do whatever we want.”'
Former Post computer-assisted reporting editor Jeffrey A. Roberts contributed to this report.
Staff writer Christopher N. Osher can be reached at 303-954-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com.
Denver police Officer Karl Coleman: Has had 21 sustained violations and at least 50 investigations from January 1997 through September 2006. He was suspended without pay for an unspecified time and then reinstated to the force after he pleaded guilty to drunken driving after a collision in 2002.
Former Denver police Officer Damian Naranjo: Suspended for six days in connection with a March 15, 2001, incident outside a LoDo bar. Investigators found that he had a woman expose her breasts and buttocks. Investigators also determined that he used excessive force later that night while arresting a man. He resigned after a woman accused him of sexual assault at a LoDo bar in 2004, but his attorney says the resignation had nothing to do with that allegation, which resulted in no criminal charges.
Sgt. Lawrence Subia: Suspended without pay for 14 months for his role in misusing an informant in a setup 1988 house burglary. He pled guilty to two misdemeanors in connection with the case.
Officer Paul Hoskins remained on the force after putting sugar in the gas tank of the boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend. His superiors suspended him for 45 days. He didn't get fired until he staged himself as the victim of a hit-and-run accident in May 2002 after he slammed his vehicle into a parked car during a night of drinking.
Officer John Albo retired in 2005 with full benefits before investigators reviewed his third “departure from the truth” case. Investigators sustained the first two, and he was suspended but not terminated. In the first case, investigators determined he didn't tell the truth to his superiors in March 2002 when they confronted him about violating the department's pursuit policy. Investigators found in that case that he gave chase in his squad car without his siren or emergency lights while children were playing nearby.
Denver police Detective Michael Nuanes initially denied in September 2003 that he had used his personal camera to take photographs of a prostitute's genitals after an arrest. Nuanes, who remains on the force and declined to comment, later acknowledged to his superiors that, in addition to taking the photographs, which had no evidentiary value, he also made crude statements to the prostitute.
Sgt. Bob Silvas held a cocked gun to his wife's head in 1984 and threatened to kill her in front of another officer, court records show. Those records, contained in a federal lawsuit, also show Silvas was accused of unnecessary force in 1998 at a Broncos football game, in 1999 while breaking up a party at a home and in 1999 while making a traffic stop. He also has been involved in nine shooting incidents, five of them fatal, the records show. He could not be reached despite numerous telephone calls for comment. His discipline record shows he has not received more than a written reprimand since 1997 through September 2006. Records for after September 2006 were not available. Earlier discipline records for Silvas also were unavailable.
Detective Karon Price was found in 1997 to have used unnecessary force when he took a handcuffed pregnant 15-year-old and pushed her into a concrete stairway and then placed his knee on her abdomen. Price was ordered to work for free at the department for seven days. Price said in an interview that despite the sustained violation, the event occurred differently than the internal affairs investigation determined.
Kurt Peterson, now a detective in the bomb squad, and his partner, since retired, admitted destroying evidence from more than 80 drug cases. They pleaded guilty to abuse of public records and second-degree official misconduct. Their lawyer, David Bruno, said at their sentencing that the gang officers destroyed marijuana or paraphernalia instead of taking the 45 to 60 minutes necessary to drive to headquarters.
| EJF Home | Join the EJF | Comments? | Get EJF newsletter | EJF Newsletters |
| Courts, Veteran Courts, And Civil Liberties | Contents | Index |
| Chapter 2 — Perjury And False Allegations |
| Next — The Double Standard On Perjury by Ed Quillen |
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