Boulder Progressives Statement on Boulder Police Oversight, Racial Disparities & CARE

City Council is meeting with the Police Oversight Panel tonight (September 24, 2026), the panel's first direct session with council in nearly two years. Boulder Progressives is asking Council to review how misconduct complaints are handled, racial disparities, and Boulder's non-police response program. We specifically raise three issues with Council: 

1. Boulder Police Department's limitations on independent police oversight, which have nearly eliminated meaningful civilian review in Boulder; 
2. the continued need for discussion and updates on racial disparities in use of force and police stops; and 
3. the City's disuse of its Community Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE) non-police response program.

All three have been priorities for Boulder Progressives for years and deserve renewed attention.

We want to start with the positive. Chief Redfearn has done an excellent job with community outreach, including a special emphasis on outreach to the LGBTQ+ community — particularly important at this moment, when trans people are under attack. But effective outreach is no substitute for independent police oversight, for policing that doesn't produce racial disparities, and for the alternatives to policing that have succeeded in other cities. So, while we commend the Department for its community engagement, we're deeply troubled by its simultaneous efforts to undo the reforms Council has put in place over the last six years to provide effective oversight, reduce racial disparities, and support non-police responses to 911 calls.

Police Oversight Panel

Chief Redfearn has stated publicly that General Order 120 gives him discretion to control how the department handles complaints from the public about officer misconduct. Using that claimed authority, and based on recent reporting from Boulder Reporting Lab, it has come to light that Boulder Police Department (BPD) has used at least the following techniques to nearly eliminate oversight through the Police Oversight Panel (POP):

1. Classifying certain complaints as "performance and conduct" so that POP review is bypassed entirely.
2. Refusing to allow POP review of complaints by agreement between the Independent Police Monitor (IPM) and the Professional Standards Unit (PSU).
3. Allowing the PSU or others in the department to weigh in on how the monitor classifies complaints — i.e., how the monitor decides which rule violations may be investigated by the POP for a given incident.
4. Failing to provide a way for the community to lodge complaints directly with the POP and/or IPM, instead routing all community complaints to a PSU sergeant — which works to intimidate complainants and get complaints dropped before they even enter the system.

None of these techniques is permitted by the City's POP ordinance, which specifically:

• Permits the POP to review all complaints of misconduct.
• Charges the Monitor, not BPD, with classifying complaints to determine what rule violations may be investigated.
• Allows the public to file complaints directly with the IPM or the POP, with the IPM as the intake point — not BPD's internal PSU.

BPD's new measures have effectively limited what the POP may review and how complaints are received and classified. At least 21 complaints have been closed without ever reaching panel or monitor review, and one member has reviewed zero cases since joining in March. None of this is consistent with the POP ordinance, whose goal was meaningful oversight of the department through an Independent Police Monitor outside the police department and a citizen panel — the POP — that is likewise outside the police department.

General Orders are the Police Chief's own internal orders, and Council doesn't have direct authority to rewrite them. But Council can and should insist that every General Order — including the current revisions to General Order 120 — comply fully with the Boulder Revised Code and the POP ordinance. As described above, the current revisions do not.

Racial disparities in use of force and stops

Boulder Progressives has previously expressed concern about unacceptable racial disparities in use of force and police stops in Boulder (see our 2025 release). After that, Chief Redfearn wrote a private memo to Council attempting to downplay the significance of the issues Boulder Progressives raised. That's unacceptable.

For example, when confronted with the fact that 10% of uses of force by BPD are against Black residents — ten times their share of Boulder's population — rather than work to reduce that disparity, Chief Redfearn has responded that the share of Black people residing in Boulder doesn't reflect their numbers in the city on any given day. That's true, but it's simply denying reality to suggest that, on any given day, 10% of the people in Boulder are Black.

The Department's unwillingness to address these racial disparities, and its attempts to explain them away instead, is a missed opportunity to build on the reforms that followed the 2019 Zayd Atkinson stop and the police-reform movement it sparked in Boulder — including the creation of the POP and the Independent Monitor.

At a minimum, Council should insist that when BPD appears for a Study Session, it provide longitudinal data on use-of-force by race and stops by race, so Council can assess whether these numbers are improving and, if not, consider whether further reforms are needed.

CARE program

Boulder created a non-police responder program at the end of 2023 with Boulder Progressives' enthusiastic support. Community Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE) pairs a behavioral health clinician with a paramedic to handle 911 and non-emergency calls that don't need a police response. City staff took a long time standing the program up and have published only limited data. That data show approximately 0.4% of 911 calls being handled by CARE. This compares with 20% with best-practices programs such as the Eugene, Oregon program, and 9% diversion in Minneapolis. Even Denver's STAR program, which has been criticized for underuse, diverts more than three times the share of calls that Boulder's CARE program does.

We'd also welcome the chance for frontline officers to weigh in constructively: where have they seen a model like CARE work well elsewhere, and how do they think Boulder could improve and expand it? CARE is housed in the Department of Housing and Human Services rather than BPD, so this is also a chance for Chief Redfearn to share his own observations on why Boulder hasn't been able to divert a similar share of calls as Minneapolis or Denver.

Our understanding is that the City is further reducing the CARE program. Given all the work Mayor Brockett and others on Council put into its creation, if the program's design hasn't allowed it to succeed, there should be a discussion about why the model has worked in diverse cities like Eugene, Minneapolis, and Denver but not in Boulder. Non-police response is a far more economical way to handle many 911 calls than, for example, expanding the number of sworn BPD officers — and it's a proven model for reducing negative outcomes in police encounters with the public while getting people in mental health distress and with other social-service needs the help that keeps them, and the community, safest.

What we're asking

This is a Study Session, not a voting meeting, so we aren't asking for formal Council action tonight. We do ask Council to:

1. Direct staff to confirm that General Order 120, and any other General Order governing how BPD handles public complaints, complies fully with the Boulder Revised Code and the POP ordinance — the current revisions do not.
2. Ask Chief Redfearn tonight where he's seen frontline officers succeed with non-police response models like CARE, and how he thinks Boulder could improve and expand the program.
3. Direct BPD to provide longitudinal use-of-force and stop data by race at future Study Sessions, so Council and the public can track whether these disparities are narrowing.