Message concerning threat not retrieved until after shooting

By Sarah Huntley, Rocky Mountain News
July 11, 2003

Denver police will investigate whether a complaint against officer James Turney, made the day before the fatal shooting of a 15-year-old developmentally disabled boy, was handled appropriately.

Cmdr. Marco Vasquez, who heads the department's internal affairs division, declined to answer specific questions about the Turney investigation, but said Thursday that the protocol for handling complaint calls is very clear.

Departmental policy, revised in January, calls for "serious complaints" against officers, or those that could amount to violations of Colorado law, to be addressed immediately.

The people who take the calls are supposed to notify a supervisor about any callers asking for internal affairs or seeking to file a complaint. If the complaint is considered to be serious, the supervisor is required to page an on-duty investigator with internal affairs, Vasquez said. Investigators are available on weekends and holidays on a rotating basis.

"My expectation as the commander of the Internal Affairs Bureau isn't just that they would transfer them into voice mail," Vasquez said. "We talk about the importance of going through an assessment, triage process."

Police sources have said that Turney, who has come under public scrutiny since the fatal shooting of Paul Childs on Saturday, was the subject of a complaint made by his ex-mother-in-law the previous day.

The former mother-in-law, who lives in Iowa, has not returned calls seeking comment. But police say she left a message Friday, on the Fourth of July, reporting that Turney had threatened during a telephone conversation to shoot her.

Some have questioned whether Turney would have been temporarily taken off the streets if the complaint had been acted on Friday.

The message, left on an internal affairs voice-mail box, was not retrieved until Monday. Turney has since been suspended with pay because of the alleged threat. Both the threat and the shooting remain under investigation.

Sam Walker, a University of Nebraska at Omaha professor of criminal justice who studies police practices and use-of-force issues, said the handling of Friday's complaint was disturbing.

"That is a serious incident," he said. "That (the failure to notify internal affairs immediately) is almost sufficient, if I were chief, to terminate someone."

The threat "raises very disturbing questions about the officer's state of mind and his qualifications for being on the street at this time," Walker said.

Walker also was troubled by information on Turney's application to the police academy, including his admission that he was turned down for a job by three other law enforcement agencies, and was named twice in civil lawsuits alleging false arrest while he worked for a security company. The outcome of those lawsuits could not be determined.

"When you combine (the alleged threat) with the things he has admitted to on his application, I think there's been a real failure in the personnel process," Walker said.

huntleys@RockyMountainNews.com or (303) 892-5212

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