The Denver Police Department doesn’t have a clear plan to address the low morale, high turnover and staffing shortages that have emerged in recent years during the nationwide push for police reform and the COVID-19 pandemic, city auditors found.
The agency has no comprehensive strategic plan, Denver Auditor Timothy O’Brien wrote in a letter that accompanied the 76-page report released Thursday.
“We found the department lacks comprehensive, documented guidance to ensure effective operations — including strategies to understand and address low retention, improve recruitment, and ensure citywide community policing efforts that can rebuild trust and relationships with residents and community members,” O’Brien wrote.
Denver police Chief Ron Thomas, who took over as chief in October, told auditors during an audit committee meeting Thursday that he’s already begun to address many of the issues they found, and that the department is in the process of developing a complete strategic plan.
A prior 30-page strategic plan was reduced to a single page in 2019 in an attempt to encourage officers to actually read the document, the auditors found. But in doing so, the agency lost critical components of the plan, the auditors said.
Thomas defended the one-page document as an effective way to communicate with officers but said a more robust plan is under development. The police department expects to have a strategic plan in place by July 1, according to the agency’s response to auditors.
Turnover within the police department spiked in 2021 and 2022 as senior officers in particular opted to leave their jobs, the auditors found. The turnover rate among officers went from 5% in 2019 to 9.5% in 2021 and 8.7% in 2022, according to the report.
Voluntary resignations and departures of senior officers more than tripled from 2020 to 2021, the auditors found. The department saw 11 such resignations in 2020, compared to 35 in 2021 and 32 in 2022, according to the report.
Officers who answered an auditor’s survey pointed to police reform efforts as a reason for the departures, and in particular a change to state law that allows officers to be personally sued for certain actions they take on the job. They also cited low morale, burnout, poor leadership and low staffing, according to the audit.
The auditors noted that the 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked a time of turmoil and calls for change within police departments nationwide, as well as a shift in the public perception of police.
Thomas said that so far this year, the turnover rate for officers is about 1.5%, much lower than the peak of 9.5% in 2021.
“We have seen improvement already our turnover rate is much better than it was before, and we do have 29% of our force that has been in the job for 20 or more years,” Thomas said. “We have implemented a number of strategies to address the needs.”
The police department agreed to take action on all of the auditor’s 16 recommendations, which include steps to develop the agency’s strategic plan, improve recruitment and retention efforts, bolster community policing, revise the staffing structure, increase officer diversity and better care for officers’ physical and mental health.
The auditors recommended the police department expand its physical therapy and mental health services for officers, and do a better job tracking officers’ weekly hours worked.
“This process has been very re-affirming to me,” Thomas said of the audit. He said the report focused on some of the same problems he has prioritized since taking over as chief.
“We will continue to be learning as an organization, and be continuing to grow — certainly informed by this report,” he said.
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