COLORADO SPRINGS — A national non-profit organization completed a nearly year-long review of the Colorado Springs Police Department (CSPD). The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) conducted an extensive assessment of CSPD and their training programs.
Chief Adrian Vasquez of CSPD said since 2022, the department has been working to provide training around how their officers use force.
“We did a competitive process to look at agencies or companies out there that could come in and do an outside study. So, it wasn't us looking at this question,” Chief Vasquez said.
PERF began reviewing CSPD in August 2023.
“They really did a comprehensive study. So they looked at everything from our policies, they rode with our officers, they did interviews with citizens and officers,” Vasquez said.
PERF analyzed CSPD's use of force, defensive tactics, de-escalation, procedural justice, and response to persons in crisis.
“They have actually been spending a ton of time with us to, really evaluate how we go about doing that,” Vasquez said.
Their report was completed last week and includes a list of recommendations. One of those was for CSPD to increase their in-service training from the Colorado minimum of 24 hours to 40 hours.
“The hands-on training or the use of force was certainly the most important that came out of it, I think. But we also want to make sure we're paying great attention to things like the procedural justice aspects that were talked about, de-escalation and how that is incorporated into other force options, or with force options,” Vasquez said.
Chief Vasquez said officers will work on de-escalation and defensive tactics improvements through a federal grant.
“We are the only police organization across the country. There was over 18,000 police departments or police organizations in the country. Now, not all of them put in for this grant, of course, but of all of the ones that did, we got selected for it.”
According to a spokesperson for the department, CSPD and PERF were recently awarded $1,325,000 from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) to conduct a three-year study of CSPD’s implementation of police focused Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu defensive tactics, which is also one of the key recommendations of the PERF study.
“It provides empirical evidence on whether something like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is an effective tool when officers have to go hands on with the suspect,” Vasquez said.
He said in their department, officers are taught to use de-escalation tactics in a situation first rather than using force.
“We want to make sure we're deescalating so we never have to go hands on. But what if we have to? You know, we want to provide officers options outside of the tools like a taser, OC spray are certainly their weapon if they have to go hands on, this is potentially going to be the safest way to do that,” Vasquez said.
Chief Vasquez said CSPD will start with a small group of officers in the Jiu-Jitsu program.
“Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in and of itself, you know, has things like chokeholds, of course. Well, we're not going to do that. It has to be very specific to what's allowable for law enforcement, and so this study will help us make those determinations,” Vasquez said.
The next step is to implement other PERF recommendations across the department.
“As we move forward, as early as next week, what I'll end up doing is taking every one of those recommendations, assigning them to a command staff member to provide a working group, bring that working group together and really take a deep dive,” Vasquez said.
The chief said another area for improvement is communications.
“Are we communicating it effectively, not only to our community, but to our officers? So, we've got to increase, or find a different way to communicate, and we enhance that,” Vasquez said. “So, we look at things like the virtual training platform that we just got, how are we going to implement that into something like ICAT, ICAP model and other other use of force options, taking their recommendations and integrating them with things that we're already doing that's pretty exciting."
CSPD has already begun implementing PERF’s recommendations and Vasquez said the federal grant will influence decisions across the country for all law enforcement agencies.
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