Her brother received the first visit. Therefore, news stations started reaching out, asking how she felt that the Aurora police agent responsible for her father’s death had not been charged.
LaRonda Jones, the family of Kilyn Lewis, swore to herself at the time that she would continue fighting until justice was served. ” I may continue to fight even harder — not only for fairness in my father’s death, but for all those different families, all those other mothers and fathers and grandparents, who have gone through the same thing I’m going through”.
According to statistics compiled by The Denver Post, Colorado authorities officers and sheriff’s deputies shot one almost every six weeks in 2024. They killed 39 folks, including Lewis, and wounded 22 people, for a total of 61.
That’s a decrease of four murders from 2023, when law police shot and killed 22 Coloradans. Colorado also ranked ninth in the country last year for fatal police killings per person, with , 6.93 people killed per million residents, according to federal data from Tracking Police Violence.
According to the organization ‘s , data on deadly police shootings, black people were disproportionately killed by law enforcement in Colorado, a trend that persists across the nation. One law enforcement agency experienced a 250 % increase in police shootings between 2023 and 2024.
Lewis, a 37-year-old Black man, was  , armed and holding a cellphone , when Aurora authorities officers , shot him in the parking lot of an apartment complex , past May. Within six hours of soldiers yelling instructions, he was shot.
Lewis was wanted on suspicion of attempted first-degree death in a separate Aurora killing earlier that month.
According to the Tracking Police Violence ‘s , 2024 report,” Black people were more likely to be killed by police, more likely to be armed, and less likely to threaten people when killed.” ” Police overwhelmingly remove Black individuals, year after year”.
Who was shot by Colorado rules protection?
The majority of people shot and killed by law enforcement in both 2023 and 2024 were white people armed with guns, according to the statistics compiled by The Post.
But, Black Coloradans were overrepresented in the information, which includes data from national directories, coroner’s offices, and law enforcement data.
Nearly 13 % of people killed by Colorado law enforcement in 2024 were Black, but Black people make up less than 4 % of the state’s population, according to the , U. S. Census Bureau.
According to Julie Ward, an associate professor at Vanderbilt University who studies people plan and gun violence, including police murders, the percentage of Black Coloradans who have been shot by law enforcement may be even higher.
” When we include both dangerous and harm murders nationally, it appears that racial differences may actually be worse than we thought”, Ward said. ” We are disregarding more injuries to Black individuals if we’re just looking at deadly killings,” said one critic.
The Post was unable to manage a similar study because of the lack of statistical information available on individuals who were shot by Colorado law enforcement agents but survived.
Some researchers rely on local media coverage, according to Andrea Borrego, a teacher of legal justice and sociology at Metropolitan State University of Denver, because the federal government has not properly mandated that law enforcement organizations report use-of-force incidents.
Some states, including Colorado, have started requiring complete investigating, but that doesn’t always job, she said.
According to Colorado’s Law Enforcement Integrity Act, the Division of Criminal Justice’s Office of Research and Statistics must report information submitted by state and local regulation police regarding resident emails and use of force.
However, no information was still available for 2024, and the company ‘s , database , merely recorded 20 cases in 2023 in which an agent or assistant fired a gun at a suspect. Between the state’s data and what The Post recorded in 2023, there is a 45-case gap.
” It’s very apparent what is happening to our community, but … it goes beyond the data. Beyond the studies and the research, “it goes beyond the studies,” said MiDian Shofner, CEO of Denver’s Epitome of Black Excellence and Partnership. ” There are things about these stories that are not reported, and that, I think, is where I can say that our community knows that this is a reality”.
She claimed that the statistics don’t disclose the insults hurled at families when they try to “be a voice for their loved ones” ( for instance, when Aurora City Councilwoman Stephanie Hancock called Lewis’s family and other community organizers” a bunch of bullies, terrorists, anarchists, opportunists, provocateurs, and others who want to lift their voices so they can get social media clicks ) or how law enforcement agencies frequently shut them out.
” Those are data points they don’t have a system for”, Shofner said. That pain, pain, and reality go beyond any study’s scope of study.
Frank Powels, 44,  , Kristin Dock, 32,  , Everett Shockley, 42, and , Kory Dillard, 38, were all Black men also killed in 2024 by law enforcement in Broomfield, Jefferson and Arapahoe counties.
Powels, Dock, and Shockley were all shot, with two of them carrying a broken broomstick handle, while Dillard was holding a , replica Airsoft rifle.
” You don’t get a chance to redo this scene and this act over again”, Jones, Lewis’s mother, said. When you take a life, that’s it. There’s no coming back from that. And that’s what we’re dealing with and dealing with daily.
The Douglas and Adams County coroners declined to release victim names and demographic information to The Post, leaving the ages, races and genders of 15 % of people killed by law enforcement in 2024 and 14 % in 2023 unknown.
Other findings made by The Post include:
—Despite making up nearly 70 % of Colorado’s population, 50 % of people shot and killed by state law enforcement in 2024 were white.
— Colorado law enforcement fatally shot two women in 2024 and three women in 2023. That’s 7 % and 5 % of all victims killed in each of those years.
Hispanics make up 23 % of Colorado’s population, but about 32 % of the people who were shot and killed by police in 2023 were Hispanic. In 2024, 23 % of fatal police shooting victims were Hispanic.
At least three people were shot by law enforcement in 2023, and five others were shot by law enforcement without their permission.
—At least five people shot in 2023 and six in 2024 were suicidal or experiencing a mental health crisis.
Approximately 67 % of those who were shot and killed by police in 2024 were adults under the age of 45. That age group only makes up 37 % of Colorado’s population, according to federal data.
In 2024, at least 17 people were fleeing law enforcement in their cars or on foot, up from 11 in 2023. Another 10 police shootings stemmed from traffic stops in 2024, more than double the four traffic stop shootings documented in 2023.
—Interruptions, fights, and reports of suspicious people were the most frequent calls that led to police shootings, accounting for roughly a third of incidents in both 2023 and 2024. Of those calls, eight in 2023 and six in 2024 included allegations of domestic violence.
More than a dozen shootings occur annually, with at least 17 in 2023 and 13 in 2024 attributed to officers attempting to contact a suspect in a crime or issue an arrest warrant.
A variety of factors impact police shootings — including specific law enforcement agencies ‘ training of officers and use of force policies, local crime rates, firearm ownership, community diversity and which agencies are responsible for responding to mental health crises — so numbers are unpredictable from year to year.
The most prevalent incidents that turn into fatal police shootings across the nation involve verbal or physical threats, according to Ward. That includes assaults, domestic violence incidents and people “verbalizing threats of harm to themselves or others”.
Police shootings that escalated due to well-being checks or other” social needs” were less prevalent across the nation but more likely to be lethal, she said.
Ward said the data calls attention to an opportunity for a different response, where people should be able to think of police as a last resort when a “better fit” solution isn’t available. She suggested that cities should invest in more targeted responses to these social needs to “reduce exposure to the potential harms of policing.”
Which departments had the most incidents?
Between 2023 and 2024, there were significant increases in police shootings at eight Colorado law enforcement agencies, with rates ranging from 50 % to 25 %.
In total, 12 agencies that had zero incidents in 2023 documented at least one police shooting in 2024, according to The Post’s data. On the other hand, 20 other departments reported no incidents last year despite having at least one police shooting in 2023.
Thornton police officers shot seven people in 2024, killing six of them. That’s the highest number of Colorado law enforcement agencies as of last year, and it’s a 25 % increase over the two fatal shootings in Thornton police in 2023.
One Thornton officer was shot , when a 27-year-old man resisted arrest and grabbed the officer’s gun after reportedly assaulting someone at a nearby gas station. In a shootout and standoff that erupted in Thornton’s Orchard Farms subdivision and ended with the suspect dead, another two officers were hurt.
In each of Thornton’s six fatal police shootings, the suspects were armed and had fired their weapons, though not necessarily at people, Division Cmdr. Connor, Tom
” That is completely out of the norm for us, not somebody being armed in an officer-involved shooting, but having six in one year where that was the case. That’s a total anomaly, according to Connor.
Under Colorado law, when possible, officers are required to give suspects a chance to comply and use nonlethal force if available, Connor said. In any of the six fatal shootings, Thornton police made no attempt to use nonlethal force, but Connor claimed the suspects had escalated the situation.
Connor said it can also be more dangerous for officers to use nonlethal force when people are armed because it doesn’t immediately incapacitate them. He claimed that this enables the armed suspect to continue to assault police or other residents of the area.
In the end, it comes down to a split-second decision, and officers must act to protect themselves or others in danger, Connor said.
Colorado Springs, Aurora, Denver, and Denver, where two people were killed and two were wounded, closely followed Thornton in the 2024 police shootings. Pueblo and Lakewood police shot another three people in each city.
Thornton’s per capita shooting rate of 4.8 % per 100, 000 residents in 2024 quadrupled Aurora’s rate of 1.1 and was more than eight times Denver’s rate of 0.55.
” In Aurora, according to the 2023 Use of Force Report, arrests and use-of-force incidents have risen every year since 2021, even as calls for service have steadily declined”, Cat Moring from the Denver Justice Project said in an emailed statement to The Post. This pattern is reflected in department decisions and a department culture that prioritizes force over community trust, according to the article.
The Aurora Police Department was placed under a consent decree by state officials in 2021 after a Colorado Attorney General’s Office investigation into Elijah McClain’s killing found a pattern of , racially biased policing and excessive force.
The department has failed to rebuild trust, as demonstrated by the decline in calls for police service, according to Moring. ” People are calling the police less because they fear dangerous encounters”.
leaving victims ‘ families in the dark
” Language is extremely important”, Shofner, the Epitome of Black Excellence and Partnership CEO, said. We’ll often say that the Black community doesn’t trust the police when this story is told and the narrative is made public. I don’t think that’s saying it the right way. It’s believed that the police have lost the confidence of the Black community.
Jones said the lack of trust also stems from the lack of information and communication from law enforcement agencies. She claimed that after her son’s shooting, the lack of answers was one of the most challenging things to deal with.
As soon as Jones could after finding out about the shooting, she was on a plane from her home in Georgia to Colorado. Authorities in Aurora called her while she was at the airport, but they were only able to take her to the hospital because they were unaware of Lewis ‘ status.
” It was really frustrating because I had a lot of questions that were unanswered”, Jones said. Questions like,” Who was the officer who killed my son?” are frequently asked. and ‘ What’s going to be done about this?’ I couldn’t get my questions answered, so I was starting to feel angry.
Connor said investigators from Colorado’s various Critical Incident Response Teams don’t release information to the involved departments during the investigations into police shootings. Whatever the department releases publicly after the shooting, including body camera footage, is all officials outside the investigation aware, at least for Thornton, he said.
” Any officer-involved shooting can affect public trust”, Connor said. ” There’s a chance that ( law enforcement ) is keeping secrets from the public,” he said,” but in reality, we’re not entitled to it most of the time.”
But Jones said her struggle with the Aurora Police Department continued even after the investigation was closed and no charges were filed against SWAT officer Michael Dieck, who shot and killed her son. She claimed that the police department had been stifling her for a while.
What happened to the officers who shot people?
The threshold for what qualifies as “misconduct” continues to be extraordinarily high despite recent reforms, including removing qualified immunity from state court, requiring body-worn cameras, and requiring decertification for officers who commit misconduct, according to Moring.
Moring said officers are rarely held accountable, and the families of police shooting victims are often left to pursue justice on their own.
Families are frequently given the resources, support, or capacity to choose between pursuing civil legal remedies or filing criminal charges, she said.
All but one of the 43 police shootings in 2023 for which The Post was able to obtain decision letters were ruled justified.
Juston Reffel, 38, was shot and killed in his car outside a dollar store on May 3, 2023 when La Salle police Officer Erik Hernandez took a deal and entered a guilty plea in January.
No charges have been filed in any of the 2024 police shootings for which The Post has obtained copies of district attorneys ‘ decision letters.
Jones claimed she was not alarmed when Arapahoe County District Attorney John Kellner decided to not charge Dieck, who fatally shot and killed her son, in a press conference.
Kellner said Dieck “reasonably believed there was an imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury”, which justified the officer’s use of force under Colorado law, according to Kellner’s decision letter to the police department.
There is no healing, according to Jones. ” Until we get justice, it won’t even begin”.
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