The Boulder City Council is scheduled to meet on Sept. 24 with members of the city’s Police Oversight Panel amid rising tensions between the panel and the Boulder Police Department over changes that have limited civilian review of complaints against officers.
The meeting will be the first time in nearly two years that the council hears directly from panel members. It could shape future reforms to the city’s civilian oversight system.
The 11-member panel reviews investigations into alleged officer misconduct and makes recommendations to the police chief, who has final say on discipline. The council created the panel in 2020, a year after a Boulder police officer drew his gun on Zayd Atkinson, an unarmed Black Naropa University student who was picking up trash outside his home.
Panel members have questioned their role in recent months after the city and police department changed how they handle complaints, allowing some cases to be closed without panel review and limiting the independent police monitor’s role in classifying allegations.
Panel member Jadzia-Dax Aurelius von Beres said he has not reviewed a single case since joining the panel in March.
“It’s getting to a point where I wonder: Should I even continue on with this panel?” Aurelius von Beres said at the panel’s meeting in September. “What is our function? What is our purpose?”
Other panel members have said the oversight system is not working as intended. “This is not what we worked so hard to build,” Maria Soledad-Diaz, a panel member and former co-chair, said at the panel’s meeting earlier this month.
In late 2025, the city began closing some misconduct cases without panel review when the monitor and the police department’s Professional Standards Unit agree a complaint is unfounded or the officer should be exonerated. The change was meant to conserve limited resources and focus on more serious allegations.
Earlier this year, panel members learned that the police department had also started implementing a revised version of General Order 120, the policy that governs how complaints against officers are handled, in late 2025. Under the revision, the department began resolving some complaints it deemed minor, such as an officer rolling through a stop sign, before they reached the monitor for classification.
City officials said the process was meant to let supervisors deal with minor complaints quickly rather than open formal investigations that can take months. Panel members said it limited the monitor’s role in classifying allegations and created a process that could be abused to protect officers.
The department put the revised order into effect while it was still under legal review, according to city officials. Under that process, the department closed at least 21 complaints against officers before the monitor or the panel reviewed them.
At its September meeting, city officials told the panel the new procedure had been paused in July while the city reviewed another revision to General Order 120. Confusion over the status of the changes led some panel members to argue the process lacked transparency.
Separately, in August, Independent Police Monitor Sherry Daun told panel members she had been unable to finalize the classification of some cases because the police department had pushed back on her classifications. She said some cases had involved months of back-and-forth.
Daun said one case that took time to classify involved a use-of-force allegation against an officer who responded to a complaint about people and belongings at the skate park area beneath the Boulder Public Library, according to a summary of the complaint. The officer told the people they were trespassing, which the panel found was inaccurate. A man challenged the officer and went to grab the officer’s flashlight or arm, according to the summary. The officer took the man to the ground and arrested him.
The panel did not sustain the use-of-force allegation but sustained three others and recommended supervisory counseling. The police chief sustained none of the allegations but directed coaching for the commander.
Panel Co-Chair Lizzie Friend said some discussion and collaboration between the police monitor and police department seemed appropriate. But she said her understanding of the ordinance is that the police monitor exists to take in complaints and classify them.
“So I’m curious why there needs to be a negotiation once the [police monitor] has made a formal determination,” she said at the August meeting. “If these cases don’t proceed soon along the misconduct track, we should ask some questions of the city manager or the city council, or whoever is in charge of the ordinance, if this reflects their intention when writing the ordinance and designing independent police oversight.”
Boulder’s city code identifies the police monitor as the “intake center” for complaints and states the monitor shall “receive and process complaints” to “ensure best practices are followed by the professional standards unit.”
Asked by Boulder Reporting Lab why implementation of the revised order was paused and why the department is involved in classifying complaints, Police Chief Steve Redfearn said General Order 120 remains under the authority of the police department and the chief of police.
“Numerous discussions have already occurred and will continue to occur with involved entities, and we have provided extensive responses when asked,” Redfearn told Boulder Reporting Lab. “It is unproductive to continue to debate these nuanced and important issues in news stories. We look forward to the five-year review of the ordinance to see how we can all work more closely on these topics to best serve our community.”
The disputes over complaint reviews come amid broader tensions between the department and the panel.
Redfearn has told the panel that about 20 officers left the department in 2025, with many citing the “system of oversight” in exit interviews. He said that even for minor infractions, officers often face a monthslong process requiring them to hire lawyers and sit through formal interviews.
Meanwhile, the president of the Boulder Police Officers Association filed a code of conduct complaint accusing former co-chair Diaz of bias. A city attorney found Diaz did not violate the city’s code of conduct.
The city has hired a consultant to help with the Police Oversight Panel’s five-year review, which could lead to changes to the ordinance governing the city’s oversight system. Anthony Finnell, a former president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, told the panel last week that he plans to present a report to the city manager in early October.
