Complying with law enforcement
accountability laws
Lone Tree takes a creative approach to state mandates
By Rachel Woolworth, CML municipal research analyst
The Colorado General Assembly has passed more than 20 policing reform bills throughout the last decade. Some of these bills, such as Senate Bill 20-217 and House Bill 21-1250, contain sweeping mandates for local law enforcement agencies – legislative requirements that hold an expensive price tag for cities and towns across the state.
Such mandates include but are not limited to body-worn camera usage, data reporting on law enforcement-citizen contacts, and limits on acceptable use of force and related de-escalation techniques.
For the City of Lone Tree, such state mandates formalized and broadened changes that were already underway within its police department. “The reality is these bills didn’t really change a lot about how we go about doing our work,” Lone Tree Chief of Police Kirk Wilson explained. “Those changes were already in process.”
Though the Lone Tree Police Department (LTPD) utilized body-worn cameras for more than a decade before the passage of SB 20-217, the bill expanded their use to command staff and detectives and created new procedures around when to turn them on and off. These changes led to a need for more body-worn cameras and higher capacity storage for video data, costing the municipality about $80,000 annually.
One big change for the department, Wilson said, is extensive reporting of citizen contact data to the Colorado Department of Law, mandated by both SB 20-217 and HB 21-1250.
LTPD is required to report every citizen contact initiated by law enforcement, whether a felony arrest or a verbal traffic warning. The department utilizes CitizenContact, a SmartForce mobile application, to collect such data for the state.
“There’s just a whole litany of things we used to document in internal reports that we also have to now report to the state,” the police chief explained. “So, in addition to documenting contacts in reports, we also have to report them in the app.”
The department has also seen an increase in Colorado Open Records Act and Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act requests in recent years. Such requests are extremely time-consuming for LTPD due to the need to redact personal information from reports and body-worn camera footage.
LTPD trains staff in various intervention and de-escalation techniques supported by the state. Though Wilson said his department would prioritize such trainings regardless of state legislation, they carry a hefty price tag.
Such educational opportunities include Crisis Intervention Teams training, Integrating Communications Assessment and Tactics courses, and Gracie Survival Tactics classes, a defensive tactics system based on Jiu-Jitsu. LTPD expects to spend more than $120,000 on use of force-related training in the next few years.
“The goal of all of these trainings is to reduce significant injuries to the suspect and officers,” Wilson said.
A shortened timeline for collecting discovery evidence for local prosecutors is also proving to be a challenge for LTPD. This expedited turnaround on evidence led Wilson to hire two full-time discovery clerks in the last two years.
For Lone Tree, the most impactful consequences of state policing reform bills are found in soft dollars – largely the staff time spent keeping up with reporting requirements and discovery obligations.
“There are cascading effects of adding additional things to officers’ job descriptions,” Wilson said of such mandates. “They can take away from an officers’ ability to respond to calls in a timely manner.”