A Denver police officer bragged to coworkers that he shot a carjacking suspect once in the head to kill him, then at least 16 times more to see his “face fall apart.” They told investigators that he spent months trumpeting his second on-duty killing and saying he was eager for a third.

Shane Madrigal resigned in 2022 while under investigation for what his supervisors deemed racist, homophobic and “grossly inappropriate” comments about killing people while he was on duty. Yet he has a clean disciplinary record with the Colorado Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) board, the state agency responsible for training and certifying police. In the eyes of the law, Madrigal — who denied any wrongdoing — remains qualified to keep serving in law enforcement.

“We had some terrible police in our community who’ve lost their jobs, but… are still able to find jobs elsewhere,” said Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola, a member of the POST board. “If we’re going to make law enforcement more professional, and if we’re going to make the state of Colorado more safe, we need to hold these people accountable.

“We have to be able to police our police.”

An investigation by the Colorado News Collaborative (CoLab), The Sentinel in Aurora and Rocky Mountain Public Media revealed a host of loopholes, mistakes and regulatory blind spots that have kept officers with documented records of abusive conduct in good standing with POST.

The investigation found that officers involved in some of Colorado’s most high-profile misconduct cases — including Elijah McClain’s 2019 killing in Aurora — show up, falsely, in the state’s new police database with clean disciplinary records. And reporters identified several who continued breaking policies and laws as they’ve been able to bounce from police job to police job.

But the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, which oversees POST, believes the state law that mandated the creation of the database doesn’t allow the inclusion of disciplinary data from before Jan. 1, 2022, spokesman Lawrence Pacheco said. That’s an interpretation disputed by lawmakers who pushed the bill.

Among CoLab’s other findings:

POST’s practice of publicly disclosing disciplinary actions taken against police only since 2022 has shielded the identities of most officers with proven records of misconduct
POST relies on local departments to report on their officers’ misbehavior, yet has not used its power to sanction those that don’t
The Colorado Attorney General’s Office says it has no authority to investigate or discipline officers whose departments have ignored their misconduct, leaving no other state agency to do so
And POST’s legal criteria for decertification are so narrow that it cannot decertify officers even when their records strongly suggest they are unfit for police work

“What kind of system allows the certification of an officer who takes pleasure in riddling people with extra bullets?” asked Trish Vigil, mother of the carjacking suspect whose fatal shooting Madrigal’s fellow officers say he gloated over. “That’s not police discipline. It’s a free pass. And it’s disgusting.”

The reforms

Law enforcement officers need to be certified by POST, an arm of the state attorney general’s office, to make arrests in Colorado. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the state started specifying the kinds of misconduct that would cause an officer to lose that status.

In 1992, the legislature directed POST to deny certification to any officer convicted of a felony. Eventually, convictions or plea deals for certain serious misdemeanors were added to the list. Those misdemeanors include assaults with weapons, sex assaults and offenses, harassment, sexually exploiting children, obstruction of justice, bias-motivated crimes and certain drug offenses.

But by far the biggest efforts to reform police discipline have come in the last four years, starting with a 2019 law that makes “untruthfulness” the first non-criminal reason for decertification.

“Peace officers make too many critical decisions to rely on the credibility of known liars,” said Michael Phibbs, at the time the chief of the Auraria Campus Police Department and chairman of the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police, which proposed the bill.

Since it passed, 53 officers statewide have lost their POST certification for falsifying criminal justice records, misrepresenting facts during internal affairs-, administrative- and disciplinary investigations, and/or lying under oath.

In 2020, responding to the outrage following McClain’s, George Floyd’s and other police killings, Colorado passed a landmark bill targeting law enforcement integrity. One provision ordered POST to create a public database to flag officers who have lost their certification. It’s also supposed to record “disciplinary actions” against those found to have been untruthful or who become the subject of a criminal probe, those who resigned while under investigation, in lieu of termination, or get fired “for cause” — meaning for intentional wrongdoing or misconduct.

Colorado is one of 14 states with such a database.

State Rep. Leslie Herod, D-Denver, co-sponsored the reform package and said winning approval for the database was long considered “an insurmountable task” given years of opposition by powerful police unions that argued it would embarrass officers, breach their privacy and unfairly keep those who’ve lost their jobs from finding new ones.

“The key was to make sure these officers who were decertified wouldn’t get a job in another jurisdiction, and for people considering hiring them to understand the liability,” Herod said. “Against the odds, we achieved that.”

A year later, the legislature began requiring departments to use the database to check job applicants’ disciplinary records. The assumption was that the information in the database would be complete and accurate.

It is neither.

In an interview, Attorney General Phil Weiser acknowledged the system isn’t performing as envisioned and said his office is working to ensure local departments know their responsibilities.

“I will not say the system is perfect,” Weiser said. “I always believe there is room for improvement.”

Glitches, question marks, delays

The database is beset with glitches.

One crucial defect causes it to show a checkmark in a box reading “certification” for some officers who have been decertified. Another causes the word “CERTIFIED” to appear in capital letters next to the names of other officers who, further clicks into the database show, have lost their POST certification.

POST says it has known about the malfunctions for about a year, but the office does not have a timeline — nor the budget — to fix them.

In several ways, the information on POST’s database raises more questions than answers.

It lists dozens of officers as having been “terminated for cause,” for example, yet doesn’t say what the cause was. And although the database may indicate that an officer is “subject of criminal investigation,” it removes that language once the case is closed, in most instances without indicating whether the officer has been convicted, and, if so, of which offenses.

“If it’s misconduct, it’s misconduct. It ought to be in there, no matter what the (severity) of crime,” said Samuel Walker, a professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who studies police accountability.

POST’s records are also frequently outdated. Some delays are legally necessary because of due process rights officers have in the decertification process, as well as a work backlog among POST’s staff. Other delays, CoLab found, stem from confusion about POST’s reporting process, miscommunication between local law enforcement agencies and POST, and paperwork errors.

The effort to decertify Colorado State Patrol Sgt. Aaron Laing, for example, sat in 10 months of bureaucratic limbo after he was fired in November 2022 for materially changing dozens of case reports written by members of a Smuggling, Trafficking and Interdiction Section team he led, and then lying about those changes. Among them, documents show, he altered a report about a 2021 traffic stop by removing references to the involvement of an undercover Homeland Security Investigations vehicle driven by a special agent.

Laing refused to comment for this story. POST decertified him in September.

It took POST nine months to decertify Officer Joseph Kanson who worked for the Evans Police Department but never finished field training and was convicted and sentenced in January on charges of impersonating an officer and a public servant. POST revoked his certification in September.

Kanson, too, declined to discuss his case.

Alamosa police Chief Ken Anderson said he has reported two of his now-former officers to POST for untruthfulness — misconduct that he assumed would have led to both being decertified. But both officers remain certified, so any other law enforcement agency in the state is free to hire them.

“I feel like we’re following the rules and it’s frustrating if we’re not being listened to seriously,” Anderson said.

Quinten Stump was a Kiowa County sheriff’s deputy with a record of excessive force when, in April 2020, he took part in killing an unarmed man, Zack Gifford, with three bullets to the back. That shooting led Kiowa County to pay a $9.5 million civil settlement to Gifford’s family and a jury to convict Stump of attempted manslaughter. He is serving a three-year prison sentence at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility, yet, as of this writing, he is still POST-certified.

POST would not comment on why Stump is still certified.

Missing data

In 2016, Denver sheriff’s Deputy Waylon Lolotai resigned while under investigation for excessive use of force.

The Boulder Police Department hired him about a month after that. Within three years, that department had launched its own use-of-force investigation against Lolotai for arresting Sammie Lawrence, a disabled Black man, by grabbing his walking aid and forcing him to the ground. Boulder ultimately paid Lawrence a $95,000 civil settlement for that arrest. While that inquiry was underway, Boulder police launched another internal affairs probe against Lolotai — this time because he called for “use-of-force Fridays” on Instagram. He resigned during that investigation in September 2020.

None of those investigations into Lolotai, nor his resignations during them, show up on the POST database. Lolotai, who could not be located for comment, remains certified to work as a police officer in Colorado.

Likewise, the POST database has no information about the involvement of three Aurora police officers in one of the most high-profile excessive force cases in state history: the 2019 killing of Elijah McClain. Responding to a complaint that the 23-year-old looked “sketchy,” officers Randy Roedema, Nathan Woodyard and Jason Rosenblatt wrestled him to the ground before Woodyard put him into two dangerous carotid holds. All were indicted in connection with McClain’s homicide. Jurors this month found Roedema guilty of criminally negligent homicide and third-degree assault and acquitted Rosenblatt,

Woodyard’s trial started last week.

None, however, shows up as subjects of criminal investigations because, as with Lolotai, their alleged misconduct took place before January 1, 2022, the date POST launched its database.

State Rep. Herod said she expected POST to include pre-2022 records when the database launched — and for a time it did include some. But the office deleted most of that information earlier this year after CoLab asked about the timeframe of the misconduct listed. Pacheco, the AG’s spokesman, told The Denver Post that three or four officers’ pre-2022 records mistakenly had been added to the database.

The result: The vast majority of Colorado officers who have disciplinary actions taken against them or who quit or were fired during misconduct investigations effectively have had their disciplinary records shielded from public view.

POST Director Erik Bourgerie would not comment on the deletion of the pre-2022 data and referred all questions to the office of Attorney General Weiser, who chairs POST’s board and has led efforts to crack down on bad cops since taking office in 2019.

Pacheco said the pre-2022 information never should have been visible to the public because the reforms that mandated the database did not specify what years should be included. Without that guidance, he said, the office relied upon state law that says new statutes are “presumed to be prospective” rather than retrospective.

“POST can only operate with the authority it has in statute,” Pacheco said on behalf of Weiser.

Herod made a point of noting it was the AG’s office, not lawmakers, that decided not to include pre-2022 information.

With only 21 months of misconduct visible to the public, experts in police discipline say it could take at least a decade before POST’s database reflects the real scope of officer misconduct in Colorado. There were about 13,000 active officers in the state in 2022 and the database shows only 186 — or roughly 1.5% — with disciplinary actions against them. The percentage of currently active officers would be much higher if pre-2022 data were included.

In the meantime, victims of police abuses predating 2022 said the omission whitewashes their experiences at the hands of abusive officers.

“(The short timeframe) helps erase the accountability that I and many other people fought for,” said Sammie Lawrence, who called Lolotai’s appearance of having a clean record in the public POST data a “farce.”

Herod said she “would be very much interested” in finding a way to require POST to include pre-2022 disciplinary actions. State Sen. Rhonda Fields, D-Aurora, another co-sponsor of the reform bill, agreed, calling it a “shame” that information is missing.

“These people are allowed to exist under the radar,” she said.

“The tip of the iceberg”

POST relies on police and sheriff’s departments to report the disciplinary actions they take against their officers. But CoLab found several that haven’t — and with impunity.

The Denver Police Department is one of them. Mary Dulacki, Denver’s deputy safety director, said the city forgot to inform POST that Officer Shane Madrigal resigned while being investigated for his comments and actions around the 2021 shooting of carjacking suspect Cedrick Vick.

POST could withhold funding or impose fines on Denver and other departments for not reporting, but it has chosen not to.

Weiser said he prefers to train and educate rather than sanction local departments as they adjust to the new reforms. And he said POST has no statutory authority to conduct an audit to determine which departments aren’t reporting or to investigate officer misconduct on its own.

Rather, POST’s sole investigator — a job that has been vacant for five months — tracks criminal cases against officers so the office is aware of de-certifiable convictions, and reviews departments’ reports about officers’ untruthfulness to make sure decertification is warranted.

POST is the only state agency that regulates law enforcement. But Weiser said it doesn’t have the power to investigate or discipline officers whose departments have ignored their misconduct, leaving no other government agency to do so.

Weiser defended what he calls POST’s “federated approach” to police discipline as consistent with the state’s long tradition of local control. He said state government counts on local departments to handle misconduct internally and isn’t set up to police the police more aggressively.

“I start from a position of trusting local and regional actors to act appropriately.”

Colorado State Public Defender Megan Ring is frustrated with the status quo.

“Public defenders see the same officers in multiple cases,” she said. “We learn pretty quickly who the bad actors are and do all we can to identify them. Yet these bad officers show up over and over again in our cases. Clearly, not enough is (being) done to root them out.”

National law enforcement researchers say it’s naive for state regulators to count on police departments to self-report.  

“I can confidently say that there’s much more misconduct than what gets (reported) to the POST board in Colorado or any state,” said Rachel Moran, a professor at Minneapolis’s University of St. Thomas School of Law who studies police discipline. “What does, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

The power of prosecutors

Legislatures in five states have given their POST boards authority to decertify officers for any type of misconduct.

Colorado isn’t among them.

Powerful police unions long have argued that a fireable offense shouldn’t necessarily be a decertifying one. In most states, unions successfully have pushed to hinge decertification on criminal convictions rather than on police standards or other potentially subjective assessments of officers’ conduct.

With a few exceptions — the 2019 untruthfulness law, most notably — that’s how police discipline works in Colorado. Of the 48 reasons an officer can be decertified here, 42 are criminal.

Many officers charged with de-certifiable offenses are able to make plea deals that allow them to stay POST-certified.

Greeley police Officer Kenneth Amick, for example, had a history of policy violations before he kneed and choked a suspect in a 2021 take-down that his department deemed to be excessive force. It fired him and prosecutors filed two charges against him, including assault by strangulation, which is de-certifiable. Amick worked out a plea deal with the prosecutor in which he pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor that lets him keep working as an officer, now in Weld County’s Garden City Police Department. And because the incident happened before January 2022, his disciplinary history does not show up in the POST database, making it appear as though he has a record of clean conduct.

Amick could not be reached for comment.

In 2022, the town of New Castle fired its then-Chief Anthony Pagni after, records show, he got drunk and pressed an AK-style weapon into his neighbor’s chest, threatening to “muzzle thump” him. After Pagni said he was in a mental health crisis at the time and his neighbor asked for leniency, the prosecutor granted him a plea deal that allowed him to remain POST-certified. His criminal case was closed, so he, too, now has a clean disciplinary record on the state database.

Pagni, when approached at his home in New Castle, declined to comment.

By linking decertification so closely to criminality, state lawmakers have effectively given district attorneys’ offices — which tend to have close relationships with the police they rely on as key witnesses — much of the responsibility for determining whether to keep an officer armed and certified.

Weiser said he understands that POST is giving up some control to local prosecutors, but that the criminal justice system is designed to start at the local level “and (I’m) comfortable honoring that system and working with it.”

“Zero regard for human life”

Shane Madrigal was an infantry Marine veteran with combat experience when, in his early 20s, he went to work as a Denver police officer in 2017.

His internal affairs investigation found he made frequent derogatory remarks about people who are Black, of Mexican descent or gay. Records also show the officer who carried two rifles with him on duty had disdain for the public he served.

“Officer Madrigal made it known that he had zero regard for human life. He reportedly expressed multiple times that he does not care for human beings, that he is not a police officer so he can help people, and his only priority is making sure his fellow officers make it home after their shift,” reads an internal affairs report from February based on interviews with several of his colleagues.

In September 2020, Madrigal took part in fatally shooting Christopher Escobedo as the car-chase suspect held a gun to his wife’s head near Denver’s Sloan’s Lake. Eight months later, Madrigal was among nine officers to respond to a carjacking of a mother and her child in Denver’s Westwood neighborhood by Cedrick Vick. The 22-year-old father of two with three types of drugs in his system used a handgun to fire randomly into a playground and then toward officers. They shot back with a total of 109 rounds, including 19 from Madrigal’s rifle.

Denver District Attorney Beth McCann determined both killings to be legally justified.

At issue wasn’t that Madrigal fired so many times at Vick, but rather his frequent bragging, coworkers said, that he did so mostly for kicks.

“He told (redaction) that he knew his first shot hit the suspect in the face, but he wanted to keep shooting to watch the suspect’s face rip apart,” reads a synopsis of one of several internal affairs interviews with his colleagues.

“Officer (redaction) stated that Officer Madrigal is typically smiling when he talks about his officer-involved shooting,” the report continues. “Officer (redaction) stated that (redaction) has never heard another officer talk about being involved in a shooting the way that Officer Madrigal does because most people are not happy about killing people.”

Madrigal told investigators that he stopped firing when he felt Vick was no longer a threat. He denied saying anything to coworkers about Vick’s face or taking any pleasure in shooting it.

At least two former colleagues told investigators that, after Vick’s killing, Madrigal told them he had a so-called “throw-down gun” that he would plant on a suspect, if needed, to justify his use of lethal force. The department recommended his termination upon finding credible those officers’ statements that he had mentioned having such a weapon.

As state law stands, there is likely nothing about Madrigal’s behavior that could cause him to be decertified. Although alarming to fellow officers and his supervisors, it didn’t cross into criminality, untruthfulness or the other criteria POST needs an officer’s misconduct to meet in order to revoke their certification.

Madrigal resigned while under investigation in 2022, his fifth year in the department. When he was contacted by a reporter for comment, twice, he declined.

“A long way to go”

As much as Devyn Vick misses her brother “Ced,” and as deeply as their mother Trish Vigil grieves, they know that his own shooting spree led police to shoot and kill him that day in May 2021.

What stings, Devyn Vick said, is that “he was so gruesomely and unnecessarily annihilated that we were not able to view him” before burial.

“If he has the opportunity to do it again, he absolutely will,” Devyn Vick said of Madrigal. “It’s a game to him, and his bodies are trophies is the way I see it.”

Public records suggest Madrigal has moved to Alabama, where the state’s POST board is not nearly as transparent as Colorado’s. Without his permission, it won’t say whether he is working in law enforcement there.

There is no national database for the public to see if officers who have left police jobs under a cloud have gone on to work in law enforcement in other communities and states.

Attorney General Weiser calls creating such a national database “the next step” to improve police discipline, but civil rights advocates say he needs to focus on fixing what’s wrong with the system in Colorado before doing so nationally.

“We need to make sure state agencies like POST and the AG’s office are fully enforcing existing laws and creating a culture where Colorado’s law enforcement agencies go above and beyond to ensure maximum integrity,” said Taylor Pendergrass, advocacy director for the ACLU of Colorado. “We also need to take a hard look at additional legislative solutions right now, especially small changes tightening up the law that might make a big impact on ensuring rogue officers are not sneaking into our police departments and out on the streets.”

“Clearly, as this reporting shows, there is a long way to go,” added Public Defender Ring.

The Sentinel in Aurora provided fellowship assistance to help make Andrew Fraieli available to the reporting team. Former Rocky Mountain Public Media Producer Brittany Freeman and Rocky Mountain Public Media Reporter Alison Berg contributed to this story. The Colorado Media Project’s Watchdog Fund provided grants to COLab and Rocky Mountain Public Media to help offset costs for public documents used in this reporting.

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