The City Council of the Denver suburb of Greenwood Village, Colorado, passed a resolution on Wednesday that effectively nullifies a portion of a new statewide policing law.
The resolution, which was unanimously passed on Monday, requires the city to find that a police officer accused of wrongdoing did not act in bad faith. This clashes with a Colorado law passed in June that allows victims of police brutality to sue the officer involved in the incident if the city finds that the officer acted in bad faith.
“The intent of Council’s resolution was simply to inform its officers that as their employer, they would not make such a (bad-faith) finding no matter what,” Greenwood Village city attorney Tonya Haas Davidson told the Denver Post. “Nowhere in the law is an employer ever required to make a finding of bad faith.”
The statewide law leaves officers financially responsible for 5% of the settlement up to $25,000 in damages if the city faces a lawsuit because of actions the officer took in bad faith. This restricts an officer’s qualified immunity, which is a legal protection for law enforcement officers that prevents them from being found personally liable in civil cases.
Colorado’s law and Greenwood Village’s subsequent ordinance are only applicable to cases at the state level that violate Colorado’s Bill of Rights. Officers in Colorado still have qualified immunity protections in any federal civil rights case. In Colorado, officers still have some protections in that penalties are capped at $25,000 where a civilian would not have such protections.
State Sen. Bob Gardner, a Republican who helped to draft the statewide bill, was flabbergasted by the city’s actions.
“That’s an abrogation of their responsibility to ensure that their officers act in a good faith and reasonable fashion,” Gardner said. “They’re prejudging all the cases out there in the future.”
“For elected officials to say there will never be any case in which they would find an officer acted in bad faith or unreasonably, is to suggest that such things never happen,” Gardner later added.
Even some police officers were surprised by the vote. Cory Christensen, the president of the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police, said that Greenwood Village’s ordinance was “prudent.”
“I don’t think that was the intent of SB 217,” he said of the state law. “I think the intent of 217 was to give communities the ability to stand behind good officers who act in good faith, but it’s also to allow communities to not indemnify officers who act in bad faith. The bigger danger for a municipality is what is the message you’re sending to your community?”
Greenwood Village City Manager John Jackson, however, said the city lost a veteran officer because of the state law.
“There’s a lot of fear around this with officers doing their jobs right, and they fear what could happen,” Jackson said. “I do not want people with ill intent in the profession of law enforcement, but what we’re doing is grouping them all together and treating them all the same, when they’re not. They feel they can’t be in the profession anymore because of the thousands of contacts that open them up to lawsuits every day.”
Greenwood Village Mayor George Lantz argued that the vote will give officers peace of mind while they are on the job. He said officers will be punished internally if there is a problem.
“If they violate a policy, they are subject to disciplinary action like any other employee,” Lantz said. “We wanted them to know we aren’t going to also subject them to personal liability on top of everything else they may face.”
Colorado was one of several states to consider reforms to policing in response to the nationwide protests that have taken place against police brutality and racial injustice following the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died after a Minneapolis officer knelt on his neck during an arrest on May 25.
