Just 11 days after Jermal Ball became a certified Colorado peace officer, he was pulled over for suspected drunken driving by an officer in his own police department.
Behind the wheel, Ball — then a trainee officer at the Durango Police Department — told the colleague who pulled him over that he hadn’t had anything to drink that night in 2022. He passed field sobriety tests, but he smelled of alcohol and slurred as he spoke. He couldn’t recite the alphabet, and the officer who pulled him over suspected the man was using insider tricks to beat at least one of the sobriety tests, according to police internal affairs records obtained by The Denver Post.
Officer Sam Kullberg decided he didn’t have enough evidence to arrest Ball for driving under the influence. But he called a supervisor to the scene who started an internal affairs investigation. As part of that, they forced Ball to submit to a breath test, and he blew a 0.157 blood-alcohol content, nearly twice the legal limit. The officers left Ball in the care of his son — who was also a Durango police officer — and removed his service weapon from the door of his vehicle.
Durango police fired Ball three days later for lying about drinking that night and for having his weapon on him while drunk, according the internal affairs records. He “cannot be counted upon to uphold the community trust,” then-Chief Robert Brammer wrote in a June 6, 2022, memo.
Under state law, Ball should have faced the revocation of his Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) certification — a credential required to work as a law enforcement officer in Colorado — because he was dishonest during the internal affairs investigation.
To read the full investigation, visit www.denverpost.com.
