The Denver Postjim spencer
Cop ruling ignores sea change
Friday, January 14, 2005 -
It took 46 pages of explanation. But in the end, the decision of civil service hearing officer John Criswell amounted to this:
Denver police officer James Turney needed a five-day suspension and a fine for threatening his ex-mother-in-law by telephone while on duty. But for shooting Paul Childs to death, Criswell ruled, Turney didn't deserve a single day off. Think about it. Childs' life was worth $1.325 million to settle a potential wrongful death suit against the Police Department because of what Turney did. Yet Criswell claimed Turney's conduct didn't merit even a one-day suspension, much less the 10 months off without pay that the city tried to give him. Denver City Attorney Cole Finegan and Mayor John Hickenlooper said city officials are still deciding whether to appeal Criswell's ruling, which was released Thursday afternoon. That ought to be a no-brainer. The city can't accept this call without exhausting its legal options. Criswell, a retired judge, said his decision wasn't about Denver's wrist-slapping of other killer cops, a process known as "comparable discipline." The hearing officer said the city couldn't discipline Turney for tactical decisions made leading up to Childs' shooting. "We are very disappointed," the always-restrained Finegan said. Disappointed? How about freaking teed off? The notion that Paul Childs' death is nothing more than business as usual insults the citizens Denver police are paid to protect. It insults Denver cops who have shown restraint in confrontations like the one that cost Childs his life. Criswell determined that no reason exists to discipline a cop who shot a retarded, legally blind 15-year-old with a seizure disorder because he refused to drop a knife within a few seconds of being told to do so. That mocks everything that has happened since the killing. Childs' death sparked one of the biggest police reforms in Denver history. The reforms included an overhaul of the police use-of-force policy. In fact, Criswell ruled those new force rules apply to future cases but couldn't be made retroactive to Turney's case. I got your irony right here. Turney's supposedly reasonable actions led to a city charter revision to hire a civilian police monitor to help watch over the cops. Yet Criswell claimed he was "convinced that no reasonable Denver police officer with officer Turney's training and background" would have stepped back from the doorway where Turney confronted Childs on July 5, 2003. Several times since the shooting, Denver police officers have saved themselves and the armed people they faced by trying to calm situations down before shooting. Turney had two cops with drawn weapons backing him up, including one with a nonlethal Taser. Childs' house on Thrill Place in north Park Hill had been evacuated. Childs never made an attacking motion with the knife he held. Yet Turney didn't step back to reassess, and Criswell said he shouldn't have. That conclusion hit Childs' mom like a slap in the face. Helen Childs, who watched Turney shoot her son, was stunned, not surprised. She saw a Denver grand jury recently refuse to indict a cop who killed an unarmed man who committed no crime that day. "I would give this back in a heartbeat to be living back on Thrill and have my son," Helen Childs said from the new home she bought with the city's wrongful-death settlement. She knows, of course, that that can't happen. What will happen, she worries, is that some other mother will find out that her child's life isn't worth a day's suspension. "It's like these officers are killing people and getting away with it," she said. It was hard to disagree Thursday. Jim Spencer's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
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