The Denver Police Department doesn’t have a clear plan to address the low morale, high turnover and staffing shortages that have emerged in recent years during the nationwide push for police reform and the COVID-19 pandemic, city auditors found.
The agency has no comprehensive strategic plan, Denver Auditor Timothy O’Brien wrote in a letter that accompanied“We found the department lacks comprehensive, documented guidance to ensure effective operations — including strategies to understand and address low retention, improve recruitment, and ensure citywide community policing efforts that can rebuild trust and relationships with residents and community members,” O’Brien wrote.
A prior 30-page strategic plan was reduced to a single page in 2019 in an attempt to encourage officers to actually read the document, the auditors found. But in doing so, the agency lost critical components of the plan, the auditors said. Thomas defended the one-page document as an effective way to communicate with officers but said a more robust plan is under development. The police department expects to have a strategic plan in place by July 1, according to the agency’s response to auditors.opted to leave their jobs, the auditors found. The turnover rate among officers went from 5% in 2019 to 9.5% in 2021 and 8.7% in 2022, according to the report.
Voluntary resignations and departures of senior officers more than tripled from 2020 to 2021, the auditors found. The department saw 11 such resignations in 2020, compared to 35 in 2021 and 32 in 2022, according to the report.
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