October 25, 2024 11:48 AM UTC

New Aurora Police Chief Doing Himself No Favors After Trump Rally Recruitment Scandal

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Cassandra Ballard reports for the Aurora Sentinel, the fifth new chief of police in Aurora since 2022, Todd Chamberlain, held his first public availability since the controversy over the department recruiting new officers from the crowd who attended ex-President Donald Trump’s rally on the edge of town early this month–an event at which Trump portrayed Aurora in what can be most charitably described as grossly inaccurate terms, perpetuating the false story that Aurora has been “taken over” by migrant gangs, a contention that Chief Chamberlain and the city’s Republican Mayor Mike Coffman agree is wildly exaggerated.

The problem with recruiting police officers from a crowd inclined to believe Trump’s lies without question was readily apparent to the Democratic minority on the Aurora City Council, but Chief Chamberlain doesn’t get it. In fact, that’s an understatement:

In his first meeting with the public, police chief Todd Chamberlain said he stands behind state mandated police reforms for the department and defended a controversial attempt to recruit officers at a recent Trump campaign rally, saying rebuffing the event would make police appear ‘fascist.’

…Chamberlain on Thursday continued to defend the decision, stating that political affiliation should not disqualify someone from becoming a police officer.

“I stick by my statement: I don’t think a political affiliation eliminates somebody from being a police officer,” he said. “It doesn’t. If we did that, this would be a fascist country, and I got a lot of problems with that.” [Pols emphasis]

Platitudes about free speech and equal treatment of “political affiliations” sidesteps the real problem. The Republican Party under Donald Trump has manufactured a false narrative about the city of Aurora that could objectively be dangerous to residents. This is a police department with a terrible history of brutality against its own citizens, operating under a consent decree and mandated reforms after years of unchecked abuse by officers. The absolute last thing Aurora needs is green police officers who patrol their beats every night believing Trump’s horror stories of a city “overrun.”

That these lies are coming from a major party’s presidential candidate does not make them any more acceptable for police officers to believe. This is where Chief Chamberlain’s defense of his officers’ “political affiliations” fails him, because it refuses to acknowledge what the Republican Party has become under Donald Trump. Obviously there are some “political affiliations” that could be considered disqualifying for a police officer, which we won’t name here since it would just be a distraction–and if you really believe the words that come out of Trump’s mouth, from “Operation Aurora” to calling for a version of The Purge to crack down on retail theft, your fitness to serve in as police officer is a reasonable question. Or at least it should be.

If you can’t bring yourself to admit this, like Chief Chamberlain, you, like Mayor Mike Coffman who despite Trump’s campaign of lies against Aurora still intends to vote for Trump, might be part of the problem.

This is not the same Republican Party that existed before Trump. The things Trump says must not be normalized.