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Statement of Mark Silverstein,
ACLU Legal Director,

ACLU NEWS CONFERENCE:
May 1, 1997

This morning the ACLU filed suit in federal court against the City and County of Denver and various Denver police officers, seeking to vindicate the constitutional rights of students and parents who were the victims of police misconduct at Thomas Jefferson High School on the evening of May 4 of last year.

The plaintiffs in this case have turned to the courts because the Denver police have failed to police themselves. They have turned to the courts because they are not convinced that there is any other functioning system of accountability that will hold police officers responsible for mistreatment of citizens.

They have also turned to the courts to prevent what happened at TJ last year from happening again.

On May 4 last year, Thomas Jefferson High School was the scene of an all-city dance sponsored by Brotha 2 Brotha, a community service organization that is one of the plaintiffs in this case. Brotha 2 Brotha has chapters at four Denver high schools. It is dedicated to building leadership and providing positive role models for African American young people.

The sixth annual Brotha 2 Brotha dance last year attracted several hundred teenagers. Most of them were African American. Several off-duty officers provided security, supplemented by about two dozen parents who served as chaperones.

The dance was a success. But as it was letting out, a fistfight broke out between two teenagers at the far edge of the parking lot, about a hundred yards from the school. The fight was quickly broken up. But soon afterward, over seventy police arrived on the scene. Many emerged from their squad cars ready for action, batons in hand.

As police moved in toward the crowd, they issued contradictory and confusing orders to the students. They accosted the students with abusive language, including racial slurs; they shoved, they poked, and they struck students with batons; students were sprayed with mace and some were falsely arrested on bogus charges of "interference" or "resisting." Police hid their name plates, refused to give their names, and swung their batons at a video camera that one student attempted to operate. As the melee ended, police were seen expressing their exuberance with hand slapping and "high-fiving."

The aggressive bullying attitude, the abusive language, the racial slurs, and the overwhelming number of police who responded, all raise very serious questions about the Denver police department’s response to gatherings of young people of color. Many believe that Denver police officers perceive any gathering of young people of color as TROUBLE, that they respond differently than they would to groups of white teenagers.

After meeting with dozens of parents and students last May and hearing first-hand accounts of what transpired that night, Mayor Webb was reportedly moved to tears. He promised a complete and thorough internal investigation.

Our clients put their trust in that process, and they feel betrayed by the results.

The police file of that investigation contains almost a hundred statements written by witnesses within a few days of the incident. Dozens of those statements report that police verbally abused the students, and over twenty of these statements report that police directed racial slurs at the students.

All the police were interviewed. Not one of them admitted hearing what the students and parents heard so clearly. One officer admitted using the word "hell."

When the much-heralded internal investigation concluded, Chief Michaud publicly explained that he could not determine whether police used racial slurs or not. The officers denied it, he explained, and he could not resolve the conflict in the evidence.

I believe that Chief Michaud knows that his officers are lying. He knows that his officers resorted to the language of the Ku Klux Klan. But he failed to do anything about it.

When law-abiding teenagers are treated like criminals and subjected to this kind of abuse, it breeds disrespect and contempt for the police.

When the police administration and the City fail to take decisive action in response racially-motivated abuse, it breeds cynicism about the process of accountability. It tells the kids that what happened to them doesn’t matter, that what they saw and heard and experienced does not deserve serious attention from our municipal authorities.

And that distrust and cynicism is perhaps the most damaging consequence to flow from the police actions that night, more damaging than the humiliation and abusive treatment, the sprains and bruises and the false arrests. These kids, our college-bound leaders of tomorrow, were brought up to believe that things had changed, that our public institutions had renounced racism, that injustice could be righted and wrongs could be redressed. We cannot afford to teach them any differently.

Chief Michaud has said he could not resolve the conflict in the evidence. By filing this lawsuit today, the plaintiffs take this issue to a forum that can resolve the conflict. By doing so, they hope to vindicate their rights, to hold police accountable, and to make sure that what happened at Thomas Jefferson high school that night will never happen in Denver again.

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