Denver Post

Professionals? Police failing to make grade
By Jim Spencer
Denver Post Columnist

Thursday, August 21, 2003 - Regina Keith spoke from a podium to a packed meeting at New Hope Baptist Church this week. But she sought out one person in particular. Keith turned her head to the left, looked directly at Helen Childs and struggled to find something encouraging to say.

The two women share a tragic bond. Both called Denver police to help them with unruly, disabled children. Both watched in horror as the cops arrived and shot their kids to death before their eyes. Keith's son, 18-year- old Gregory Smith, was deaf. He died in January 2002. The same policeman who helped shoot Keith's child also killed 15-year-old Paul Childs on July 5, 2003. Childs was mentally challenged and suffered from a seizure disorder. Both teens held knives when they died.

The similarities are as depressing as their lack of resolution.

"I have no words, Ms. Childs," Keith said as a crowd of 150 state legislators, city politicians, preachers, prosecutors, police officials and community activists fell silent. "There are no words."

There won't be until public expectations replace police excuses.

As the area reels from two recent police shootings - Childs in Denver in July and the Aug. 5 killing of Denise Washington in Aurora - something must give.

Counting on the public to be the only group keeping the peace in this crisis makes no sense. The New Hope meeting was to organize yet another reasoned response to seemingly irrational acts. Participants formed committees to review police policy, oversight and training. Speakers proposed to prohibit lethal force against suspects who aren't carrying firearms. Calls came for citizen review panels that do independent investigations of police and mete out discipline.

But the most telling comment in two hours of angry, emotional venting came from the regional NAACP director, the Rev. Gill Ford, who has served on police review boards in Denver and elsewhere.

The majority of officers do a good job, Ford explained. And police officers do dangerous work that the rest of us don't want to do.

But, Ford continued, "they chose that job. We as taxpayers paid for their training." Officers are professionals, and "professionalism means we have the right of expectation."

That declaration is so important it bears repeating: Professionalism means the public has the right of expectation.

We call police when loved ones get out of hand because we believe officers are trained to control, not kill. This shouldn't be an unnatural hope nor an unattainable goal. Excusing officers because they have hard jobs misses the point.

Police chiefs and prosecutors in Denver and Aurora appear to be on the verge of making the same mistake.

At Tuesday's New Hope meeting, the Rev. Acen Phillips, a candidate for City Council in Aurora, called the killing of Denise Washington the result of an inexperienced officer's decision to rush into a confrontation. Phillips noted that Washington, who had a history of mental illness, was at the top of some stairs brandishing a candlestick. She had threatened family members, but at the point of her death, she could have hurt no one but herself. No one, that is, until a police officer climbed the stairs to confront her. Washington swung at the cop and hit him in the hand with the candlestick. The two then scuffled until the policeman shot her.

"We've got to change the state law and city ordinances," Phillips insisted. "There's not much our police chiefs and district attorneys can do."

It's way past time for them to try.

Police chiefs must make their officers as accountable as the people on the street. District attorneys must charge officers with crimes as they do regular folks. Or everybody in law enforcement leadership must lead the fight to get that power.

None of that seems to happen. It certainly hasn't happened here.

Instead, the job gets left to people packed in church meeting rooms, not players in the halls of power. The meeting-room types care but are too often marginalized by the mainstream. They are like LeRoy Lemos. He's been fighting police brutality and corruption in the Denver area for a decade.

"It should go without saying that hundreds of Denver police do a tremendous job for the citizens and visitors to the city," Lemos said at New Hope on Tuesday. "The issue I have been involving myself with is the rogue element, the cancer that affects the Denver Police Department.

"There has to come a day when people who make mistakes, like many of my brown and black brothers, are joined in jail by people who made bad decisions and choices while wearing a badge. Someone has to say accountability is going to start now."

When Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman and Denver District Attorney Bill Ritter stand before the City Council and the General Assembly and say that, when Aurora law enforcement officials do the same thing, there's a chance to meet expectations.

Until then, there will be no words for people betrayed by their purported protectors.

Jim Spencer's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays in The Denver Post. Contact him at jspencer@denverpost.com or call 303-820-1771.