Redfearn 1/29/2024

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Boulder's interim chief on police reform, Elijah McClain and JonBenet Ramsey




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Boulder Police Department Interim Chief Stephen Redfearn listens to a question during an interview in his office on Monday, Jan. 29, 2024, in Boulder, Colo.(Timothy Hurst/Denver Gazette)

• [color=var(--light-gray)]Timothy Hurst[/color]
  

Boulder Police Department Interim Chief Stephen Redfearn listens to and contemplates a question during an interview in his office on Monday, Jan. 29, 2024, in Boulder, Colo.(Timothy Hurst/Denver Gazette)

• [color=var(--light-gray)]Timothy Hurst[/color]
  

[url=https://denvergazette.com/news/stephen-redfearn-elijah-mcclain-jonbenet-boulder-police/article_7787eaf4-c08e-11ee-8564-7719f902e993.html#3]

Boulder Police Department Interim Chief Stephen Redfearn answers a question during an interview in his office on Monday, Jan. 29, 2024, in Boulder, Colo.(Timothy Hurst/Denver Gazette)

Stephen Redfearn has been on the scene of some of Colorado’s most high-profile tragedies — Columbine, the Aurora theater shooting, the death of Elijah McClain, and the December 2021 Marshall Fire.
“It seemed like if it was going to happen, I was working,” he said in an interview from his second-floor Boulder office Tuesday.
As president of the Colorado Fallen Hero Foundation, Boulder’s new interim police chief also took the lead in planning Boulder Police Officer Eric Talley’s funeral after he was killed responding to the March 2021 King Soopers shooting.


Former Chief Maris Herold announced her resignation this November and Redfearn has officially been at the helm for two weeks.
He plans to apply for the permanent position with the City of Boulder. He joined the Boulder force in September 2021 as Herold’s deputy chief after 23 years at the Aurora Police Department.
"I needed a break from the constant chaos," he said. "My phone rang almost every night as Aurora's Division Chief of Operations. My phone doesn’t ring as much here."
Redfearn helped Herold establish, and is carrying out, a Reimagining Policing Plan which was approved by Boulder City Council in September 2023. It's a national effort pushed by the Obama Foundation, which calls for police departments to review and reform “use-of-force policies and/or ways to redefine public safety and combat systemic racism within law enforcement.”
To do that, the Boulder Police have asked for extra patrol officers, sergeants and lieutenants, plus the millions it will take to implement a transformation to the system. Redfearn calls the reimagining idea "police reform in a non-traditional sense" because "something had to be done after the murder of George Floyd."
Boulder’s plan works on a 60-40 principle, which stipulates that 60% of an officer's time should be spent responding to calls for service and the other 40% lies in community problem solving, for instance, “issues dealing with the unhoused,” said Redfearn.
The 27-year-old unsolved murder case of JonBenet Ramsey case is now his to oversee as an administrator and he is tight-lipped about last fall's meeting with the Cold Case Review Team — although he did budge on a timetable to get a DNA profile, assuring that "in the very near future we will be able to proceed with that."
Though he has met with the slain six-year-old's father, John Ramsey, and her brother John, he won't say whether Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey are persons of interest in the unsolved murder.  
"We are not sitting on our hands," he said. "We are never going to stop trying to solve this case."
Priorities
At the top of the 45-year-old's priorities as interim chief are community engagement, and recruiting and retention of officers.

Like many local police departments, the competition to get new recruits is intense. Even with 16 recently sworn officers, the Boulder force is at 172, down from the target 190-officer level.
“We’re constantly in a hiring cycle and sending people to the academy,” said Redfearn, who is anxious for people to see his officers as human beings at events like "Coffee with a Cop."
There's been a disconnect between law enforcement and the general public since the murder of George Floyd, he said. 
“After 2020 we lost a lot of the face-to-face communication. We were vilified. We all became that officer who leaned on George Floyd’s neck. Right wrong or indifferent,” he said. “Good change has come out of the Floyd tragedy because we’ve all taken a look at our systems.”
One of his most controversial duties at Aurora Police, it turns out, came when he was called to oversee an active situation involving a young Black man who had been jumped by officers and then injected with an overdose of ketamine by paramedics. 
Elijah McClain Case
Redfearn took criticism last year when members of the NAACP Boulder County called on him to resign over his involvement and testimony in the McClain case. 

The night of Aug. 24, 2019, Redfearn arrived on scene as McClain was unconscious and on the way to the hospital. At issue with the Boulder NAACP was the fact that as night captain, Redfearn updated the original call with dispatch from being classified as a “suspicious person” incident to “assault on an officer." He changed the classification code, he said, because he was told that McClain had tried to take one of the officer’s guns. This turned out to be untrue, according to prosecutors and evidence presented during the criminal trials of the three APD officers at the end of 2023.
At the time there was no classification code for an incident specifying the attempt to confiscate of an officer’s gun.

Redfearn said that when he arrived, the incident was so heated that he immediately made the order to investigate it further instead of sending the officers on their way to write reports.
“I was like ‘Woah, everybody time out. This is a critical incident. We’ve got to treat this like an officer involved shooting',” he told The Denver Gazette. He said that the protocol involved interviewing the officers and calling the district attorney and critical incident team.
He later testified against the officers for the prosecution in the trials, which he said was “difficult.”
One officer was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide third-degree assault in McClain's death, and sentenced last month to 14 months in jail, with work release, and four years probation. The other two officers were acquitted of all charges.

But Annette James, president of NAACP’s Boulder chapter, said she is concerned that Redfearn “just took that statement,” she said. “He should have been a bit more thorough. If you really care about building community engagement, then you are truthful and don’t hide behind an archaic police policy.”
Darrin Olson, chair of the group's justice committee accused Redfearn of being "non-inclusive" and "not appropriate for a chief or even beat cop."
These are statements which Redfearn said were “frankly offensive.” He wrote an op-ed to in the Boulder Daily Camera to defend himself, describing McClain’s death as “heartbreaking.”
Aurora theater shooting
Just after midnight July 20, 2012, Redfearn was on duty when he received an urgent call to respond to a shooting at the Century 16 movie theaters in Aurora. Sirens blaring, he was one of the first officers on scene by the back door where the gunman's car was parked. As he began pulling bleeding victims from theater 9, James Holmes was placed in his patrol car.
With so many lives on the line and minutes to spare, ambulances were slow in coming. The only option was to place victims in police cars and send them to hospitals.
“The decision was desperation. I was so frustrated,” he told The Denver Gazette.

The makeshift ambulances with frightened and often dying victims began careening to hospitals which had beds to spare.
To make sure he didn’t overwhelm medical personnel, Redfearn made a mark on his plastic gloves every time a vehicle took off. By the time proper ambulances and fire trucks arrived, Redfearn had already navigated at least 27 wounded people to emergency rooms.
That hour of quick thinking was one of his proudest.
“It was insane," he said. "I hope we never deal with anything like that again.” 
The hiring process
Redfearn may be interim police chief at least until this summer, as the process of recruiting and hiring Herald’s replacement has just begun, according to Sara Huntley, director of communication and engagement for the City of Boulder.
“The hope is to have a new chief by 2025. Maybe even summer or early fall,” Huntley said.

The city is in the process of hiring a specialized recruiter to find the right pool of applicants for the job.
In the meantime, Redfearn is moving ahead with running the Boulder force — happy to be in a place where violent crime does not consume his life as it did in Aurora. His nights are no longer tied to the phone, so he's able spend time with his husband, a Venezuelan immigrant, and their rescue dog Roscoe.
His advice? Don’t believe everything you read. Or see.
“I walk into a room and people say 'look at that guy. He’s a White, assumed cisgender, straight male," he said. "The White part is right, but there are a lot of layers to many of us here.”