GREENWOOD VILLAGE – A Denver suburb is promising to pay all legal costs for police officers accused of misconduct in reaction to Colorado’s new police accountability law that makes officers who acted in bad faith financially liable for their actions.
Greenwood Village passed a resolution Monday that says it will never find that a police officer acted in bad faith, protecting officers from a provision of the law which requires officers to pay up to 5% or $25,000 of any judgment in a lawsuit if they were believed to have knowingly violated the law.
“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 in an email Wednesday. “Nowhere in the law is an employer ever required to make a finding of bad faith.”
Bill supporter Sen. Bob Gardner, R-Colorado Springs, said he thought the resolution was an “attempted end run” around an important part of the law.
“That’s an abrogation of their responsibility to ensure that their officers act in a good faith and reasonable fashion,” Gardner said Wednesday. “They’re prejudging all the cases out there in the future.”
The law was quickly passed amid protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It also bans chokeholds and limits force to only being used to “when all other means of apprehension are impractical given the circumstances.” It also requires all local and Colorado State Patrol officers who have contact with the public to be equipped with body cameras by July 1, 2023.
