Colorado police shot someone every 6 days in 2024, data shows

Miami Herald

05-05-2025

The first call came from her nephew. Then, news stations started reaching out, asking how she felt that the Aurora police officer responsible for her son's death had not been charged.
"Right there, I swore to myself at that moment that I would never stop fighting until we got justice," LaRonda Jones, the mother of Kilyn Lewis, said. "I will continue to fight even harder - not only for justice in my son's death, but for all those other parents, all those other mothers and fathers and grandparents, who have gone through the same thing I'm going through."
Colorado police officers and sheriff's deputies shot someone roughly every six days in 2024, according to data compiled by The Denver Post. They killed 39 people, including Lewis, and wounded 22 others, for a total of 61.
That's down four shootings from 2023, when law enforcement killed 43 Coloradans and injured another 22. Colorado still ranked eighth in the country last year for fatal police shootings per capita, with 6.93 people killed per million residents, according to national data from Mapping Police Violence.
Black people were disproportionately killed by law enforcement in Colorado - a trend that persists across the country, according to the organization's data on deadly police shootings - and one law enforcement agency saw a 250% increase in police shootings between 2023 and 2024.
Lewis, a 37-year-old Black man, was unarmed and holding a cellphone when Aurora police officers shot him in the parking lot of an apartment complex last May. He was shot within six seconds of officers surrounding him and shouting commands.
Lewis was wanted on suspicion of attempted first-degree murder in a separate Aurora shooting earlier that month.
"Black people were more likely to be killed by police, more likely to be unarmed and less likely to be threatening someone when killed," Mapping Police Violence's 2024 report stated. "Police disproportionately kill Black people, year after year."
Who did Colorado law enforcement shoot?
The majority of people shot and killed by law enforcement in both 2023 and 2024 were white men armed with guns, according to the data compiled by The Post.
However, Black Coloradans were overrepresented in the data, which includes information from law enforcement agencies, coroner's offices and national databases.
Nearly 13% of people killed by Colorado law enforcement in 2024 were Black, but Black people make up less than 4% of the state's population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The percentage of Black Coloradans shot by law enforcement could be even higher, said Julie Ward, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies public policy and gun violence, including police shootings.
"When we include both fatal and injury shootings nationally, it appears that racial disparities may actually be worse than we thought," Ward said. "If we're only looking at fatal shootings, then we're disregarding more injuries to Black survivors."
The Post was unable to run a similar analysis because of the lack of demographic information available on people who were shot by Colorado law enforcement agents but survived.
The federal government has never successfully mandated that law enforcement agencies report use-of-force incidents, leaving many researchers to rely on coverage from local media, said Andrea Borrego, a professor of criminal justice and criminology at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Some states, including Colorado, have started requiring comprehensive reporting, but that doesn't always work, she said.
Colorado's Law Enforcement Integrity Act requires the Division of Criminal Justice's Office of Research and Statistics to report data submitted by state and local law enforcement on citizen contacts and use of force.
However, no data was yet available for 2024, and the office's database only recorded 20 instances in 2023 in which an officer or deputy fired a gun at a suspect. That's a 45-case gap between the state's data and what The Post recorded in 2023.
"It's very apparent what is happening to our community, but … it goes beyond the data. It goes beyond the research and the studies," said MiDian Shofner, CEO of the Denver-based Epitome of Black Excellence and Partnership. "There are things about these stories that are not reported, and that, I think, is where I can say that our community knows that this is a reality."
She said the data doesn't show the insults hurled at the families when they try to "be a voice for their loved ones" - including an instance when Aurora City Councilwoman Stephanie Hancock called Lewis's family and other community organizers "a bunch of bullies, terrorists, anarchists, opportunists, provocateurs and others who want to lift their voices so they can get social media clicks" - or how law enforcement agencies often shut them out.
"Those are data points they don't have a system for," Shofner said. "That hurt, that pain, that reality goes beyond any research in any study."
Frank Powels, 44; Kristin Dock, 32; Everett Shockley, 42; and Kory Dillard, 38, were all Black men also killed in 2024 by law enforcement in Broomfield, Jefferson and Arapahoe counties.
Powels, Dock and Shockley were armed - two with guns and one with a broken broomstick handle - but Dillard was holding a replica Airsoft rifle.
"You don't get a chance to redo this scene and this act over again," Jones, Lewis's mother, said. "When you take a life, that's it. There's no coming back from that. And that's what we're facing and dealing with every day."
The Douglas and Adams County coroners declined to release victim names and demographic information to The Post, leaving the ages, races and genders of 15% of people killed by law enforcement in 2024 and 14% in 2023 unknown.
Other findings by The Post include:
-Despite making up nearly 70% of Colorado's population, 50% of people shot and killed by state law enforcement in 2024 were white.
-Three women in 2023 and two women in 2024 were fatally shot by Colorado law enforcement. That's 7% and 5% of all victims killed in each of those years.
-About 32% of people shot and killed by police in 2023 were Hispanic, though they make up 23% of Colorado's population. In 2024, 23% of fatal police shooting victims were Hispanic.
-At least three people shot in 2023 and five people shot in 2024 were unarmed or not reported to be armed by law enforcement.
-At least five people shot in 2023 and six in 2024 were suicidal or experiencing a mental health crisis.
-Roughly 67% of those shot and killed by police in 2024 were adults under the age of 45. That age group only makes up 37% of Colorado's population, according to federal data.
-At least 17 people shot by police in 2024 were fleeing law enforcement in their car or on foot, up from 11 in 2023. Another 10 police shootings stemmed from traffic stops in 2024, more than double the four traffic stop shootings documented in 2023.
-The most common calls that escalated into police shootings were disturbances, fights and reports of suspicious people, accounting for roughly a third of incidents in both 2023 and 2024. Of those calls, eight in 2023 and six in 2024 included allegations of domestic violence.
-More than a dozen shootings each year - at least 17 in 2023 and 13 in 2024 - stemmed from officers trying to serve an arrest warrant or contact a suspect in a crime.
A variety of factors impact police shootings - including specific law enforcement agencies' training of officers and use of force policies, local crime rates, firearm ownership, community diversity and which agencies are responsible for responding to mental health crises - so numbers are unpredictable from year to year.
Across the country, the most frequent events that escalate into fatal police shootings involve verbal or physical threats, Ward said. That includes assaults, domestic violence incidents and people "verbalizing threats of harm to themselves or others."
Police shootings escalating from well-being checks or other "social needs" were less common across the country, but more likely to be lethal, she said.
Ward said the data calls attention to an opportunity for a different response, where people should be able to think of police as a last resort when a "better fit" solution isn't available. She said cities should invest in more targeted responses to these social needs to "reduce exposure to the potential harms from policing."
Which departments had the most incidents?
Eight Colorado law enforcement agencies saw significant increases in police shootings between 2023 and 2024, ranging from 50% to 250%.
In total, 12 agencies that had zero incidents in 2023 documented at least one police shooting in 2024, according to The Post's data. On the other hand, 20 departments that had at least one police shooting in 2023 reported no incidents last year.
Thornton police officers shot seven people in 2024, killing six of them. That's the highest of any Colorado law enforcement agency last year and a 250% increase from the two people shot in Thornton police in 2023.
One Thornton officer was shot when a 27-year-old man resisted arrest and grabbed the officer's gun after reportedly assaulting someone at a nearby gas station. Another two officers were injured in an hours-long standoff and shootout that rattled Thornton's Orchard Farms subdivision and ended with the suspect dead.
In each of Thornton's six fatal police shootings, the suspects were armed and had fired their weapons, though not necessarily at people, Division Cmdr. Tom Connor said.
"That is completely out of the norm for us, not somebody being armed in an officer-involved shooting, but having six in one year where that was the case. That's absolutely an anomaly," Connor said.
Under Colorado law, when possible, officers are required to give suspects a chance to comply and use nonlethal force if available, Connor said. Thornton officers did not attempt to use nonlethal force in any of the six fatal shootings, but Connor said the suspects escalated the situation.
Connor said it can also be more dangerous for officers to use nonlethal force when people are armed because it doesn't immediately incapacitate them. He said it allows the armed suspect to continue to assault officers or others in the area.
In the end, it comes down to a split-second decision, and officers must act to protect themselves or others in danger, Connor said.
Thornton was followed closely in 2024 police shootings by Colorado Springs, where four people were killed and two were wounded; Aurora, where four people were killed and one was wounded; and Denver, where two people were killed and two were wounded. Pueblo and Lakewood police shot another three people in each city.
Thornton's per-capita rate of 4.8 shootings per 100,000 residents in 2024 quadrupled Aurora's rate of 1.1 and was more than eight times Denver's rate of 0.55.
"In Aurora, according to the 2023 Use of Force Report, arrests and use-of-force incidents have risen every year since 2021, even as calls for service have steadily declined," Cat Moring from the Denver Justice Project said in an emailed statement to The Post. "This trend reflects internal policy decisions and a department culture that continues to prioritize force over community trust."
The Aurora Police Department was placed under a consent decree by state officials in 2021 after a Colorado Attorney General's Office investigation into Elijah McClain's killing found a pattern of racially biased policing and excessive force.
"Despite these reforms, the department has failed to rebuild trust, as evidenced by the decline in calls for police service," Moring said. "People are calling the police less because they fear dangerous encounters."
Leaving victims' families in the lurch
"Language is extremely important," Shofner, the Epitome of Black Excellence and Partnership CEO, said. "Oftentimes, when this story is told and the narrative is put out, we'll say that the Black community doesn't trust the police. I don't think that's saying it the right way. It's that the police have lost the trust of the Black community."
Jones said the lack of trust also stems from the lack of information and communication from law enforcement agencies. She said the shortage of answers was one of the most difficult things to deal with after her son's shooting.
As soon as Jones could after finding out about the shooting, she was on a plane from her home in Georgia to Colorado. Aurora officials called her while she was at the airport, but they could only direct her to the hospital and didn't know Lewis' status.
"It was really frustrating because I had a lot of questions that were unanswered," Jones said. "Questions like, 'Who was the officer who killed my son?' and 'What's going to be done about this?' So a lot of anger was building up as I couldn't get my questions answered."
Connor said investigators from Colorado's various Critical Incident Response Teams don't release information to the involved departments during the investigations into police shootings. At least for Thornton, whatever the department releases publicly after the shooting - including body camera footage - is all officials outside of the investigation know, he said.
"Any officer-involved shooting can affect public trust," Connor said. "There's the potential that it looks like (law enforcement) is hiding information from the public when, in reality, the majority of the time we're not entitled to the information."
But Jones said her struggle with the Aurora Police Department continued even after the investigation was closed and no charges were filed against SWAT officer Michael Dieck, who shot and killed her son. She said she was still continuously dismissed by the police department.
What happened to the officers who shot people?
Despite recent reforms, such as ending qualified immunity in state court, requiring body-worn cameras and mandating decertification for officers who engage in misconduct, the threshold for what counts as "misconduct" remains extraordinarily high, Moring said.
Moring said officers are rarely held accountable, and the families of police shooting victims are often left to pursue justice on their own.
"Families are still forced to choose between fighting for criminal charges or seeking civil remedies - rarely with the resources, support or capacity to do both," she said.
All but one of the 43 police shootings in 2023 for which The Post was able to obtain decision letters were ruled justified.
La Salle police Officer Erik Hernandez took a deal and pleaded guilty in January to manslaughter after shooting and killing 38-year-old Juston Reffel in his car outside of a dollar store on May 3, 2023.
No charges have been filed in any of the 2024 police shootings for which The Post has obtained copies of district attorneys' decision letters.
Jones said she was not surprised when Arapahoe County District Attorney John Kellner decided not to file charges against Dieck, who shot and killed her son.
Kellner said Dieck "reasonably believed there was an imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury," which justified the officer's use of force under Colorado law, according to Kellner's decision letter to the police department.
"There's no healing," Jones said. "Until we get justice, it won't even begin."
_____
Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.