Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas Forum: What DPD Beating Survivor Wants to Hear

“We don’t know what this individual is going to do until he does it,” Landau says. “If we’re going to have him in this position for the long haul, we should start to get documentation and an understanding of his agenda items now, so we can hold him accountable if he doesn’t build the relationships we need to make sure community health and safety are actually prioritized the way they should be.”

In January 2009, Landau, then a nineteen-year-old Community College of Denver student, was beaten bloody after being pulled over by three DPD officers for making an illegal left turn. Although the cops never faced criminal charges for their actions, just over two years later Landau received a police-brutality settlement from the City of Denver valued at $795,000 — an enormous sum at the time. However, the money was far less important to Landau than the goal of improving law enforcement, and in the years since, he’s been a tireless advocate for reform.

When Paul Pazen was named DPD chief in 2018, Landau was initially optimistic. “When he was the commander of District 1, he was very community-oriented. He worked with community groups like the Harm Reduction Action Center and the Denver Justice Project,” Landau recalls, “and he played a role in bringing in the Support Team Assisted Response to engage individuals experiencing distress related to mental health issues, poverty, homelessness and substance abuse.”

In the years following Pazen’s elevation to the department’s top job, however, Landau points out that “we’ve seen hundreds of low-level drug arrests and an uptick in law-enforcement-related shootings. … He became the opposite of the man we saw as commander of District 1.”

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Alex Landau’s Twitter portrait.

Landau is particularly critical regarding Pazen’s advocacy of sweeps at Union Station, which he sees as criminalizing poverty and addiction rather than addressing larger safety concerns. “We cannot incarcerate our way out of substance misuse,” he says. “What we can do is address it head-on with treatment and alternatives to punishment. Last I checked, murder was still illegal, and we’ve had one of the most violent years in Colorado history — but we’re not helping that by putting people in jail for a sickness.”

Landau is also alarmed by what he sees as the DPD’s recent propensity toward recklessness and excessive force. “There seems to be a historical pattern and practice among many officers on the force to not only shoot first and ask questions later, but to overshoot — to empty your magazine to the point where there isn’t even an opportunity to understand the dynamics of whatever the altercation is,” he says.

A prime example for Landau: the July 17 shooting near Larimer Beer Hall that injured six innocent bystanders. “Instead of taking accountability for their actions, they decided to move food trucks from the area to allegedly prevent congestion,” he notes. “Those are the kinds of things the community doesn’t need to see.”

Asked if he’s frustrated that use-of-force violations continue more than a decade after his violent encounter with Denver cops, Landau stresses that “these things were happening long before my case. I think about the people who came before me and how they must feel, and the preemptive nature of these types of abuses. But all we can do is strategically look at our approach and push for a shift in consciousness and participation on a broader scale.”

Pazen’s August 31 retirement announcement and Thomas’s subsequent elevation to DPD chief provide a chance for a fresh start, and during tonight’s conversation, Landau says, “I’m hopeful that members of our community will participate and drop knowledge in the room in ways that maybe the chief won’t have thought of. We’ll have experts who deal with the community on a day-to-day basis, many with lived experience. And if we really want public health and safety for everyone from police to rich individuals in Cherry Hills to people experiencing homelessness and everything in between, we need to get an understanding of what everyone’s needs are. Dismantling a system requires something to be constructed or implemented in its place, and that’s going to take a collaborative effort.”

The community forum with Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas will get underway at 6 p.m. at the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Studio, 119 Park Avenue West, and both in-person and Zoom options are available. Click for more details.