As a Los Angeles police officer, David Guiterman shoved a handcuffed homeless man into a squad car and leaned in to drench his face with pepper spray.
Video of the incident showed Guiterman closing the car’s door, a move that cut off ventilation and created what critics later called a “gas chamber” of horror. The mentally ill suspect pleaded for help, his face twisted in pain.
Despite Guiterman’s past in California, which also included a $50,000 settlement of an excessive-force lawsuit, he found work across state lines.
He ended up in Colorado, a state that does relatively little to keep cops with blemished records from being rehired in law enforcement. Soon Guiterman was causing controversy again after his new employer, the Vail Police Department, arrested him on charges of domestic violence and stalking.
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Colorado is vulnerable to officers such as Guiterman coming from other states seeking to resurrect their careers, according to experts. Only a criminal conviction on a felony charge or certain misdemeanors automatically bar a cop from getting hired in law enforcement in Colorado, a lesser standard than in many states.
But the extent of the problem is unknown, in Colorado and nationally.
“We know it happens,” said Roger Goldman, a nationally recognized expert on officer misconduct who has helped write laws establishing state police review panels. “But we don’t know how frequently it happens. Anecdotally, we know there have been high-profile cases of it.”
He noted that malpractice litigation and adverse licensing actions are tracked federally for physicians, but no such system exists for law enforcement officers, who have the power to take a life and make arrests.
“We have it for docs but not for cops,” Goldman said. “That’s a problem.”
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The Denver Post made multiple requests for a state database of certified and decertified law enforcement officers from the state attorney general’s office to research the backgrounds of those trained in other states. The office refused to release key information to enable that analysis.
The state provided limited data that revealed that nearly 1,100 of the officers who held police certificates in Colorado in the past 10 years had received their original training outside the state.
But the attorney general’s office refused to identify those officers still working or the state where they received their training. Also excluded were all the agencies where those officers had worked in Colorado.
In a letter denying the newspaper’s request for information, David Blake, Colorado’s chief deputy attorney general, said making the database available to the public risked revealing the identity of officers working undercover. He refused to redact those undercover officers from the database.
“While the public has a right to inspect certain public records involving criminal justice matters, it does not have the right to pursue them at the expense of the safety of officers or when it may compromise ongoing investigations,” Blake said in his letter.
The Post has argued the information should be released as a matter of public safety.
“I find it unconscionable that our state attorney general’s office takes the position that it has no obligation to produce to The Denver Post or to a member of the public these database records,” said Steven Zansberg, the lawyer who represented The Post in its negotiations with the state’s lawyers.
Taxpayers helped build the database. A recent contract shows the state plans to spend up to $820,000 on upgrades to the database through 2018.
“The additional, highly disturbing aspect of this entire set of negotiations with the attorney general’s office and The Denver Post, aside from the amount of time it took to get them to dribble out any amount of information, is that they take the position that the public, who helped maintain and create this database, has no right to access those records,” Zansberg said.
National database
Despite the obstacles from the state, The Post found examples of officers who were hired in law enforcement in Colorado after getting into trouble in jobs in other states.
Guiterman resigned from the Los Angeles Police Department and was hired in Vail in 2005 before the completion of an internal affairs investigation into the pepper-spray incident, the results of which remain sealed. Vail Police Chief Dwight Henninger said he was aware of the incident when he hired Guiterman.
The officer successfully defended a federal lawsuit over that arrest in Los Angeles, which prompted national outrage when a lawyer released video of the spraying after Guiterman resigned. In sworn testimony, Guiterman said he used the pepper spray to subdue an uncooperative suspect he feared would spit on him. He resigned from the Vail police force in 2009, nearly a year following his arrest on the domestic violence charges in Colorado. Guiterman did not respond to Denver Post efforts seeking comment.
In 1991, the police department in Davenport, Iowa, fired Anthony Chelf after authorities found he used excessive force when he beat a man with his department-issued flashlight. Records show the man ran a red light on a motorcycle, and Chelf gave high-speed chase. Chelf beat the man with his flashlight after other officers had subdued him, facedown, on the ground, according to court records.
It was the second time Davenport authorities found Chelf had used his flashlight with excessive force. After his firing, Chelf found police work in Colorado. The Ouray Police Department hired him, and he went on to become police chief there. He retired in 2011 and now works as a security supervisor at a casino in Iowa.
“I had a very successful career in Ouray and was very involved in the community,” said Chelf, who added that he disclosed his Davenport firing before his hiring in Ouray.
In a court challenge, Chelf argued his firing was politically motivated, but the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the termination.
The issue of troubled officers moving across state lines attracted the attention of President Barack Obama’s task force on policing, formed in the wake of the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a white officer in Ferguson, Mo. Among its recommendations, the task force urged the U.S. Justice Department to bolster a piecemeal police decertification database that agencies can use to check applicants.
So far, only 37 states, including Colorado, feed information to the database. And the laws for what warrants a decertification vary widely from state to state. While Florida and Arizona allow decertifications for personnel transgressions or misconduct, others, such as Colorado, have no state investigative authority and allow decertification only for criminal convictions. Six states don’t allow for the decertification of officers at all.
Surveys show only about 20 percent of police agencies even know the database exists. “We don’t have the money to advertise it,” said Mike Becar, executive director of the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training, which maintains the database.
High threshold
In Colorado, where a criminal conviction is required to decertify a cop, an officer with a history in other states of lying under oath, past misconduct, even brutality is eligible to find work here.
Colorado’s laws also provide little guidance to smaller, often rural, agencies struggling to find qualified applicants to patrol the streets. Unlike Arizona, which requires rigorous background investigations of those seeking police work, Colorado for the most part leaves the thoroughness of such investigations up to local authorities.
At least 39 states have laws that make it easier to ensure a rogue officer never polices again in those states, The Post found.
In Oregon, dishonesty or misconduct on the job is enough to bring an end to a career in law enforcement. State officials there have no qualms about releasing the type of information Colorado’s attorney general withholds from the public.
Blake, in the letter to The Post denying release of the database, said Pennsylvania officials similarly rejected requests from a Pittsburgh newspaper for a database on officers working in that state.
But The Post found that Pennsylvania and Colorado differ from other states in their refusal to share such information with the public. The Post surveyed several states and found other states readily make such information public. Arizona, Florida, Arkansas, Kansas, Oregon and Missouri are among those states that release such information.
Lyle Mann, executive director of the Peace Officers Standards and Training Board in Arizona, said Arizona believes in strong state oversight of law enforcement officers and transparency on just who they are. He noted that in states such as Colorado, there’s a lower threshold for revoking the licenses of physicians for wrongdoing than for decertifying police.
“From my perspective, you can pick your doctor,” Mann said. “You are making a decision as to which doctor is going to provide service to you as a citizen. But you don’t get to pick your police officer; the police officer picks you.”
Michael Lorsung crossed state lines to find work in Colorado after he resigned from the Frazee, Minn., police department in 2010. Records show his resignation brought an end to an internal affairs investigation into allegations he harassed, threatened and stalked an ex-girlfriend.
Lorsung was not criminally charged, but the woman filed a restraining order against him, alleging he entered her house uninvited and ordered a subordinate officer to pull her over for no reason.
He landed a job as town marshal in De Beque, a year after his resignation in Frazee.
“There was no background check conducted on him whatsoever,” said Guy Patterson, who became town manager in De Beque after Lorsung’s hiring. “Shockingly, nobody even bothered to Google his name.”
Lorsung was fired from the De Beque job in April, the same month that the Colorado Bureau of Investigation arrested him for selling one of two trucks he arranged to be donated to De Beque and pocketing $5,000 from the sale. He pleaded guilty to embezzlement of public property and official misconduct.
“Unqualified officers go sideways from department to department all the time in this state,” said Patterson, who is leaving his post in De Beque to take a job in Lake County.
“The attitude out there is, ‘We’re a small town, and we’ll get what we can get,’ ” he added. “It’s horrifyingly dangerous.”
Christopher N. Osher: 303-954-1747, cosher@denverpost.com or @chrisosher
