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October 8, 2020
ADAMS & JEFFERSON COUNTY, COLORADO
A publication of
WestminsterWindow.com
VOLUME 75 | ISSUE 50
Northglenn police board gets green light Councilors back plan for citizen-led oversight committee
where one man was killed and a woman injured was injured. The pair were accused of stealing a car. It was the largest use of force settlement in Colorado’s history. The city hired consultants BerryDunn to review the department’s operations and write the report in the wake of that settlement. The 391-page document is available in PDF format on www.northglenn.org, the City’s website. A shorter executive summary of the report — containing all of the report’s findings without the supporting data — is posted there, too.
BY SCOTT TAYLOR STAYLOR@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
City Councilors lined up Sept. 28 to favor a permanent oversight board to monitor the Northglenn Police Department and weigh in on policies. “I’m super excited, but really proud of our staff because this is cutting edge and it’s new,” Mayor Meredith Leighty said. “The fact that you are all willing to take this risks is impressive.” City Manager Heather Geyer and Police Chief Jim May presented three options to give the city more public model of managing the city’s police, ranging from having the department manage the process to creating one-time citizen task force to lead the effort to appointing a permanent citizen Community Co-Production Policing board to work with police going forward. Both Geyer and Hall said they favored the permanent board. “This, we believe, would be a longterm, fully invested commitment by residents of Northglenn,” Geyer said.
A management report on the Northglenn Police Department has local activists looking for ways to change the way policing in the city currently operates and is funded. SCOTT TAYLOR It would a permanent board authorized through a City Council ordinance supported by consultants BerryDunn, the chief and other staff. Geyer said she it would likely be similar in make-up as the newly seated Social Equity Board. “This is a long-term investment and I believe the full outcome of this approach is complete CCPP (Community Co-Production Policing) implementation.” Creating the Board should cost the
city $57,000 to pay for consultants BerryDunn and for technical assistance. Councilors agreed unanimously. “It’s clear a lot of thought has gone into this, and it’s clear that option three makes a lot of sense,” Councilor Jenny Wilford said. The decision comes in response to a report on the police department the city commissioned late in December 2019 after agreeing to a $8.75 million settlement that stemmed from a 2017 shooting
New Philosophy The report notes that Northglenn’s police administration are already backers of Community Oriented Policing, a philosophy that tries to build ties between the police and the people. A major recommendation of the report, beyond adding new officers and reorganizing police beats, was to go beyond community policing to create a Community Co-Production Policing board. That would be a group of city officials and Northglenn residents that could review department policies and procedures, recruiting and hiring new officers, keeping current staff, and SEE POLICE, P2
Colorado loosens school quarantine guidelines for some areas Some can send home ‘close contacts’ of COVID cases instead of entire cohorts, classrooms BY ELLIS ARNOLD EARNOLD@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
With thousands of students sent home from in-person classes or told to quarantine in the first several weeks of the school year in metro Denver districts, the state public-health department released relaxed guidelines outlining that in some cases, entire
classes or larger groups of students no longer need to quarantine in response to a positive COVID-19 case. In schools in counties operating under the strictest level of Colorado’s safer-at-home social distancing order — where the coronavirus’s spread remains relatively high — classes or cohorts of students would still be quarantined in response to a positive case under the new guidance, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. To minimize exposure when COVID-19 cases occur, students this year generally attend school in groups, or “cohorts,” of varying sizes. For example, Cherry Creek School District uses a plan for grades six through 12
INSIDE: VOICES: PAGE 10 | LIFE: PAGE 12 | CALENDAR: PAGE 15 | SPORTS: PAGE 36
that splits the student population in half. On the other hand, in counties where the virus’s spread is milder, some schools can undergo more targeted quarantines of “close contacts” of an infected student instead of the student’s full class or cohort, according to the department. The new guidance was to take effect Oct. 5. Quarantines and related dismissals of students from in-person classes have resulted in entire grade levels and schools moved temporarily to online classes in metro Denver school districts. Some school district leaders had raised complaints about the state public-health department’s policy. “CDPHE has put out overburden-
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some guidance,” Superintendent Scott Siegfried said at a Cherry Creek School District school board meeting. Siegfried took issue with classmates needing to quarantine regardless of how close they were to the student who tested positive. “It’s becoming difficult to find substitutes” for classes whose teachers have been quarantined, Siegfried said at the board’s Sept. 14 meeting. Littleton Public Schools Superintendent Brian Ewert recently called the quarantines “somewhat overreaching” and also called for narrower criteria for who should be sent home. SEE COVID, P9