Boulder Chief of Police Stephen Redfearn attended a regular quarterly meeting with the Police Oversight Panel (POP) on December 16 and spoke about the department’s imminent publishing of a dashboard that will include use-of-force data for the public to access.

This comes after several years of community members and POP members requesting use-of-force data, not only for the entire department, but anonymized use-of-force data for individual officers. When asked if the latter would be available on the dashboard, Redfearn stated he was not sure and raised concerns about sharing individual employee data.

We should all be concerned, but not for the reasons Redfearn was likely referring to. Sharing information with the public would allow the public to see what the average officer’s use of force is such that an individual officer’s use of force could be compared to the average to look for officers using force dramatically more often than the average officer. It is a simple analysis that a high school student could perform.

When such data was provided — average use of force by all officers, along with the individual use of force data for Officer Waylon Lolotai, that was exactly what happened: The public was able to compare Lolotai’s use of force and see that, according to the data, he was close to using force ten times more than the average officer (for a deep dive on this topic, see boulderbeat.news/2022/04/02/boulder-police-force-data).

This was no surprise, unfortunately, given that Lolotai was hired even after he resigned from the Denver Sheriff’s Department during an investigation into his use of force at a county jail. He was under investigation for allegedly slamming an inmate to the ground and participating in beating a man at the jail. His apparent propensity for violence therefore should have been known before he was even hired, but Boulder defended his actions because the investigation was closed — which was a result of his resignation as a deputy because Boulder hired him as a police officer.

Lolotai was ultimately set to receive a reprimand from BPD, not for his use excessive and frequent use of force, but because he was caught promoting police use of force in social media posts. Evidently, within BPD, expressing publicly the opinion that informs actual use of force is the policy violation that BPD concerns itself with: what the public knows.

It is telling that Lolotai was apparently well-regarded by BPD officers and management, right up to the point he resigned and was given roughly a year of his salary paid by the citizens of Boulder. This to an officer who should have been identified as extremely problematic and either terminated or, at the least, been subjected to scrutiny and further training to reduce his reliance on force as a compliance tool.

We should, therefore, be skeptical of Chief Redfearn throwing the term “transparency” around when speaking about the dashboard and use of force data that does not allow the public to identify those officers using force far more frequently than their average peer. Without anonymized data for individual officers to compare to the average use of force, BPD can continue to employ potentially highly problematic officers, such as Lolotai, and the public will be kept in the dark.

Per the POP ordinance, such data should also be made available to the POP, and as mentioned previously, has been requested multiple times over the years. BPD and Chief Redfearn should not be able to circumvent these rights of the POP to seek such data on behalf of the community by producing a far less useful set of data publicly than what POP members have requested.

Our community and the POP that represent our interest in fair and equitable policing deserve to have BPD and Chief Redfearn ensure our constitutional rights are not being violated via transparent access to these records. Community members should not be subject to excessive force, and BPD should not be allowed to avoid its duty to provide records that will greatly inform them about problematic officers.

For those that agree, you can email Chief Redfearn about this at RedfearnS@bouldercolorado.gov, or the city manager at Rivera-VandermydeN@bouldercolorado.gov.

Darren O’Connor is the Criminal Justice Committee Chair for the local NAACP chapter.