AURORA | Aurora police reached a major milestone in their campaign to proactively publish enforcement data this week, opening up an online “transparency portal” for crime statistics, use-of-force info and agency demographics to the public.
Police launched the website, www.AuroraGov.org/APDPortal, Feb. 14, giving residents the ability to view data in the form of charts, graphs, standalone files and interactive maps.
“I think of it as kind of a living entity as far as us continually updating it and not just saying, ‘Okay, that’s enough, we’re done,’” said Chris Juul, chief of the department’s Professional Standards and Training Division.
“As the community looks at this information, if they develop questions, or if there’s something they would like to see, or if something doesn’t make sense, we want feedback from them so we can continuously improve it. So, with our community’s help, we’ll make it even better.”
Aurora’s Police Department released the portal almost two years to the day after officers began operating under the city’s consent decree, which mandates dozens of public safety reforms, including changes to how police collect and make public enforcement data.
While department spokesman Joe Moylan said the portal satisfies two of the transparency-related reforms mandated by the decree as well as parts of two other mandates, police and city officials pointed out that the decree doesn’t explicitly call for the creation of a portal and said discussions about developing the website began about four years ago.
“It started as part of that national conversation around what police reform should look like,” City Manager Jason Batchelor said. “We think this meets those minimum requirements. But we’re also not just looking to meet the minimum requirements. We want to go well above and beyond that.”
APD has been trekking toward reform since the 2019 homicide of Elijah McClain, which sparked an investigation by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office that alleged a pattern of excessively violent, racist policing by Aurora cops.
In September 2021, the City of Aurora and the Colorado Attorney General’s Office inked the 46-page consent decree. The agreement includes a schedule for when APD, Aurora Fire Rescue and the city’s Civil Service Commission were expected to make certain changes.
Besides overhauling the police department’s record-keeping and data systems, the decree mandates changes to how police hire, train and promote officers to make the police force more representative of the community and to avoid a repeat of the events that led to McClain’s death.
The city was given up to two years to meet the demands of the decree, after which it would be closely watched for another three years to ensure it doesn’t slide back into past problems.
The clock on the five-year decree officially started Feb. 15, 2022, when the city signed its contract with IntegrAssure, a Florida-based risk management firm hired to monitor Aurora’s compliance with the agreement.
Since then, Aurora cops have watched the police chief’s position change hands three times.
APD has made strides toward complying with the decree, rewriting policies on physical force and constitutional rights, retraining officers on those policies and changing how uses of force are reviewed after the fact.
The department has struggled, however, to meet deadlines related to data and tracking uses of force. IntegrAssure wrote in an October report that “no one in APD has the ability to easily access the data to analyze issues, trends, patterns or practices.”
IntegrAssure blamed a contractor, Benchmark Analytics, for the department overshooting its July 2022 deadline for collecting and analyzing use-of-force metrics and for APD’s problems managing data about officers stopping citizens, suggesting police look for another vendor if the contractor couldn’t deliver. Moylan said the department’s use-of-force data has since been successfully migrated to the Benchmark system.
The transparency portal was developed with the help of another software consultant, Esri, which also worked with the city to integrate maps to help users make sense of incident-based data.
Data is at the heart of the effort to measure Aurora’s progress and rebuild trust with the public. This week, after the transparency portal went live, the department’s top cops were in a celebratory mood.
“We are really excited about the portal,” Juul said. “It’s been a long time coming.”
For now, the portal lets the public access data about when and where police have received reports of the most serious crimes tracked at the national level by the FBI, including homicide, aggravated assault, sexual assault, robbery, arson, burglary, motor vehicle theft and larceny.
The portal also provides a breakdown of the demographics of APD employees as well as information about officers’ uses of force, showing the “tier,” or severity, of force used in individual incidents as well as the race and ethnicity of the citizens involved.
A contact form allows the public to offer specific feedback on the functionality and data currently included in and absent from the portal, which city and police officials said will inform future updates.
The department plans to update the crime metrics and use-of-force data available through the portal every Tuesday, while agency demographics will be updated quarterly. Previously, much of the data could have only been obtained through formal records requests, which the department often takes weeks or months to turn around.
There are limits to the data offered through the portal — for use-of-force data specifically, incidents that result in a death or a more intense investigative process may not be entered for an indeterminate amount of time, although department employees have the ability to scrape data about individual incidents to enter into the portal.
“We’re a little bit at the mercy of the outside entities doing those investigations and how long those may take,” Juul said.
“Subsequent to that. our internal investigation has to take place for policy and training compliance. So all of that adjudication does take a little bit longer with the higher levels of force, which are only a handful a year. However, what we are intending to do is provide as much data as we can and update it as that data comes in.”
Members of the public who want to get information about an individual use-of-force incident still must file a records request.
However, officials said the portal’s current shortcomings are proof of the fact that the website is a work in progress that will continue to tie in more data as community members offer feedback.
“This is just the first step,” Batchelor said. “I’d say it’s maybe 50% or 60% of the initial information sets that we want to push out.”
Juul said subsequent updates to the portal will see the department publish information about call outcomes, including arrests and the filing of criminal charges, as well as officer commendations and complaints submitted by the public.
Some of the mandates in the decree related to data remain unfinished two years into the process. For example, a mandate requiring the department to document and track misdemeanor arrests and summonses issued for failure to obey a lawful order, resisting arrest, trespassing and similar crimes is still a month or two from completion, Juul said.
It took just two days for the Aurora Municipal Court to turn over aggregate data about the numbers of those charges filed in 2022 and 2023 and the race of defendants broken down by the outcomes of charges in response to a request by the Sentinel.
IntegrAssure president Jeff Schlanger said satisfying the requirement will involve tracking data from the court as well as the police department. Juul said the department is figuring out how to compile the information from court databases that it doesn’t normally access or use.
“We’re currently working on that piece as we speak,” Juul said.
He said the department also hopes to roll out its anti-bias training for officers and finish sending officers through the training in about 10 weeks. The department has argued that it is more important to develop a training that is effective and tailored to Aurora cops than to have met the February 2023 deadline for the training in the decree.
One of the groups urging the department to meet deadlines has been the Community Advisory Council, which was established by IntegrAssure to serve as a link between the public and the people directly responsible for implementing the agreement.
“We were a little behind schedule when it came to the data portal, so we just kept asking, ‘What’s the holdup?,’” said council co-chair Omar Montgomery, who also serves as president of the Aurora NAACP.
“We were asking those questions that sometimes may have come off as adversarial, but that was far from the case. Our goal is to represent the community voice, and make sure that public safety is a top priority, and make sure the community has buy-in as police reform moves forward in the city of Aurora.”
Montgomery said he has personally seen the department become better at sharing information and responding to community concerns in a timely way since the reform process began.
He said he had a positive first impression of the portal, which the police department previewed for the council before launching it publicly. He described it as an investment by APD in transparency and a step toward reform.
“I’m very optimistic that we can continue to see even more transparency from APD,” he said.
Others questioned why the initial release of the portal didn’t include information related to officer discipline and records of misconduct.
“This is what Aurora has had problems with. They don’t report when someone has broken a law,” said Candice Bailey, an Aurora activist and former city council candidate. “There needs to be transparency around who is serving us in our community, because that’s one of the things that’s really missing.”
She said the portal should be expanded to include information about reports of misconduct made to the Colorado Peace Officer Standards and Training Board as well as officers being included on Brady lists — rosters of police officers with a history of credibility issues maintained by prosecutors’ offices.
Montgomery said he hopes future updates to the portal will include data about the ages of suspects as well as more tools to analyze where crimes have been reported in the past.
He also said he would like to see the portal incorporate the results of public opinion surveys — IntegrAssure president Jeff Schlanger wrote in an email that a survey commissioned by the firm in 2022 to gauge Aurora residents’ feelings about the city’s public safety agencies will be repeated later this year.
Batchelor said Feb. 7 that the department would likely be moving into the second phase of the decree in “the next few weeks,” at which point IntegrAssure will begin shadowing the department’s compliance with the changes for at least three years.
This week, Batchelor said the city is in the process of figuring out with IntegrAssure and the Colorado Attorney General’s Office what this next step in the reform process will look like for the city.
“That won’t mean the work stops. It means the work under the consent decree takes a different form, and I think, quite frankly, the hard part now begins,” Batchelor said.
“We’re in a period where we now need to be tracking and reporting on those changes, and then doing the really hard work to figure out, are we being effective? Are we seeing the changes that are envisioned underneath the consent decree? And, what can we do better?”
