Denver police plan to begin collecting racial data about the people officers stop by the end of the year, after years of saying such an effort would be too difficult and expensive to implement.

Chief Robert White said the policy reversal is an effort to ensure accountability.

“Officers need to know and citizens need to know how everyone’s actions are going to be held accountable,” White said last week in an interview with The Denver Post. “Without it, we can’t prove anything one way or the other. That does not benefit the transparency or the credibility of the department.”

White’s decision comes after the department spent years resisting calls from the city’s minority communities to collect the data. It would be the first time in 14 years the department has tried to study racial bias within its officer ranks.

The current climate in law enforcement demands it happen, White said. His plans for collecting the data are still in the works, but he said he did not plan to involve community representatives in putting it together.

White, who was hired in 2011, said he never has been opposed to collecting racial and ethnic data. Community activists have heard excuses ranging from it would be too time-consuming to it wasn’t necessary for years and say this is a new position for the chief.

“If DPD was willing to collect demographic data all along, why was there a litany of voices from community groups, legislators, the Denver Auditor and Independent Monitor all pushing for them to collect it?” said Lisa Calderon, co-chair of the Colorado Latino Forum’s Denver chapter. “Because DPD refused to collect it.”

Denver is the first of the state’s largest departments to voluntarily collect the data. During a state legislative committee meeting in 2015, most departments that testified, including Colorado Springs and Aurora, said they did not collect information on the race and ethnicity of contacted individuals.

Vince Chandler, The Denver Post Protesters gather on the steps of Denver's City and County Building to call for an end to racial injustice in policing. In the summer of 2016, the protesters took a 135-second moment of silence in memory of the black people killed by American police departments as of July 11, 2016. Denver police are beginning a pilot program that will gather data on traffic stops and pedestrian searches in an effort to track any racial profiling and bias.

John Leyba, The Denver Post During a June meeting hosted by the Colorado Latino Forum's Denver chapter, people asked Denver Police Department Chief Robert White to start measuring racial bias and profiling within his department. White said he was open to the idea and he since has started to put together a program to collect data.

Photo by Michael Reaves, The Denver Post After police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota in July, protesters took to Denver's streets to demand racial justice. Many renewed the call for a study of racial profiling within the Denver Police Department.



Stephanie O’Malley, executive director of Denver’s safety department and White’s boss, also has resisted it, once saying that asking people about their race could potentially turn otherwise peaceful interactions into a volatile situation.

O’Malley now has changed her mind, too. The city listened to the community’s concern and recognizes the importance, she said.

“There has been outreach from members of the community to collaborate with us on the collection of data concerning law enforcement contacts and we are not adverse to having that happen,” O’Malley said in a statement. “We will explore ways to meet expectations while considering the impact of acquiring personal information from residents during their interactions with police officers.”

The calls for data collection increased after the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., on July 5 and Philando Castile in a St. Paul, Minn., suburb on July 6. Both were killed by police officers, and their deaths sparked another round of nationwide protests.

Among those who have demanded that Denver police study racial profiling within its ranks are Black Lives Matter 5280, the Colorado Latino Forum, The Denver Justice Project, the NAACP’s Denver chapter, the ACLU of Colorado and Showing Up for Racial Justice.

Those groups have written petitions, held rallies and marches, sponsored community forums and met with law enforcement leaders.

All believe that blacks, Latinos and American Indians are stopped and searched at disproportionate rates to white people.

“Community members know it exists because we live with it day in and day out,” said Alex Landau, a co-founder of the Denver Justice Project. “But the data isn’t collected so it’s easy to say it doesn’t exist.”

Sasha McGhee, a co-leader of Black Lives Matter 5280, said it is well past time for city leaders to prove — one way or another — what is happening.

“It’s important to take some steps toward transparency and keeping police officers accountable for their actions when engaging the community,” McGhee said.

Two public officials also have called for data collection — Denver auditor Timothy O’Brien and Nick Mitchell, the independent monitor.

A January auditor’s report concluded that a lack of statistics put the department at risk of criticism and lawsuits. By doing so, the department would know whether its officers were in compliance with its biased-policing policy.

The department adopted a new bias-policing policy in 2015 at Mitchell’s urging. “These enhancements not only benefit DPD, but also the citizens the communities they serve,” the report said.

“While this was a move in the right direction, we won’t be able to measure the impacts of that new policy without this data,” Mitchell wrote last week in a statement.

In 2015, Deputy Chief Matt Murray testified before a legislative committee considering a statewide mandate for all law enforcement agencies to collect it. Doing so would put a burden on overworked officers, he said.

“Even if data collection takes 45 seconds, add that to all of the calls we get,” Murray later told The Denver Post in an interview. “Response times would go up.”

Murray also referred to a 2001-02 study on Denver police traffic and pedestrian stops, saying the study’s authors did not find anything the department needed to act on. Murray insisted that Denver police do not stop minorities at higher rates.

Related Articles A woman and a juvenile female were shot in west Denver this morning

Denver police cut budget for financial reasons; public safety remains bulk of city spending despite protests

Man killed in overnight shooting in Denver

Gang killings in Denver spike as instability and internal conflicts cause bloodshed

Denver police provide more details about the three people they’ve shot and killed in the past week “There are some people who want to believe what they want to believe,” Murray said then while speaking on behalf of the department. “They don’t want facts to get in the way of what they want to believe.”

But critics argued that there were no facts because no current studies had been conducted.

The collection of racial data on police stops became a prominent issue in the late 1990s as minority communities complained that police unfairly focused on them and their neighborhoods. But the issue faded and departments stopped collecting it.

Denver conducted a study of racial data in 2001 and 2002 after it was mandated by the state legislature. When the two-year mandate was lifted, the program ended.

In that study, officers filled out contact cards after making traffic stops or stopping pedestrians. They also recorded the precinct where they made the stop, the reason behind it and what kind of action was taken such as searches and arrests. They also said whether or not they found contraband.

The study was conducted by Deborah Thomas, a geography professor at the University of Colorado Denver, under the oversight of a panel filled with community members and police officers. The panel hosted meetings across the city to report findings.

But the project wasn’t funded, and it was time-consuming for Thomas, who was striving for tenure in her department.

“Everything just sort of dropped and that’s too bad,” she said.

While Denver police officials have said the study did not uncover any issues with racial profiling, Thomas said that is not the case.

“That’s interesting that’s their interpretation,” she said.

The report found that while whites, blacks and Latinos were stopped at similar rates, blacks and Latinos were held for longer periods and searched more often. Hispanics were less likely to be caught with contraband, the reports found.

“You don’t need to have someone say it was statistically significant to know you have an issue with that,” Thomas said.

And the findings were surprising because the national focus at the time was between police officers and black communities. No one was paying attention to what was happening with Latino residents, she said.

Those details along with dozens of community meetings were constructive, Thomas said.

“It’s a hard conversation, of course,” she said, “but it’s a conversation that has to be had.”

The shift in White’s position emerged in June at a Colorado Latino Forum meeting about police shootings in the community where he shared a platform with the mother of Ryan Ronquillo, a Hispanic man killed in 2014 in a police shooting.

At the meeting, people asked again for police to collect the data. That’s when White first said publicly that he wasn’t opposed to collecting data, several people have said.

“We got a different answer than we have in the past,” Calderon said. “It was a change in position.”

Now, it’s important to put together a program the community trusts, said Lonnie Schaible, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Colorado Denver.

Schaible, who has testified about data collection programs on the state level, recommends bringing in a neutral party to design the program and write reports.

“A classic issue with police analyzing police is a lack of trust,” Schaible said.

It’s also wise to create a committee with diverse voices to determine what questions need to be answered and how to collect data that would answer those questions, he said.

“What is it we want to do? What do we want to understand?” Schaible said. “Is data collection the answer?”

Other large cities — New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago — collect data, said Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia University law professor who studies police enforcement and accountability. There’s no reason Denver cannot do it, he said.

“I’m sure Denver would like to be in the big leagues with those cities,” he said.

The department would need to train its officers on how to ask people which race or ethnicity they identify with, he said.

Denver is not the only police department slow to collect racial data.

“I think police departments know there is a risk that some unconstitutional practice will be revealed,” Fagan said. “Some violation of policy might be revealed.”

White had wanted to wait on projects under development in California. There, state law requires law enforcement start the data collection in 2018, and the vendor Denver police uses for records management has multiple clients in California.

“My preference was to wait until California gets it done and we can piggyback off that and it will be less expensive,” White said last week. But he decided Denver should not wait until 2018 or beyond to get going.

Thus far, White does not have specifics on Denver’s data collection program.

Mitchell will be involved, White said. He would want to be able to detect which officers showed racial bias.

But the chief isn’t interested in creating a committee to give input.

“I’m not trying to get a panel of 100 people to decide how we collect data,” he said. “That would be too time-consuming and it would never get done.”

Already, though, community activists are gearing up to challenge White.

“Now, they agree to collect it, but not be transparent about how it will be collected and the findings. How is that moving the ball forward and advancing community trust? It doesn’t,” Calderon said.

“The time for minimal effort has passed given the rising tensions between police and communities of color. DPD should be ‘all in’ to signal to the public that they are dedicated to collecting and analyzing data to help prevent future tragedies involving unarmed civilians.”