The Boulder Chamber hosted a candidate debate on Thursday between the Democratic primary frontrunners for Boulder County Sheriff, Curtis Johnson and David Hayes. The current sheriff, Joe Pelle, is not running for reelection after 20 years as sheriff.
The primary election is June 28 and voters have until Monday to change or withdraw their affiliation if they wish to vote in a different party’s primary election.
Below is a transcription, edited for clarity and brevity, of their debate.
Opening remarks
Curtis Johnson: My name is Curtis Johnson, I'm running for sheriff. I am a product of Boulder, born and raised, also a product of Boulder Valley School District. I'm married. My wife, Janet, and I have been married 29 years. We have two adult children who both live in Longmont and both work in schools. So gun safety right now is a bit on my mind, given the threats to their safety just doing their jobs.
I became a cadet with the sheriff's office and that was my introduction to policing. I fell in love with the exposure and the experience of having a different day every day, not being tied down to a desk and actually getting out in the community and working with people and solving problems. I began my career with the Boulder Police Department in 1993.
I worked for the Boulder Police Department for a little over 27 years and rose to the rank of deputy chief. I served both as the operations deputy chief and the support services deputy chief, which gave me broad exposure to the entire function of the police department and working in municipal policing.
In 2020, Sheriff (Joe) Pelle and I had a conversation about running for sheriff and in 2021, he recruited me away. I retired from the police department and went to work for the sheriff's office. For the last 15 months or so, I've been working at the sheriff's office as a division chief, learning the organization and figuring out what I'm getting myself into as a first-time political candidate and someone who wants to take over the sheriff's office.
There are a number of things that are important to the community with regards to the sheriff's office. It's a far larger responsibility than municipal policing because we run the county jail, which currently houses about 420 people. We also are responsible for wildfire coordination of response, and we have other crises in the criminal justice system that are impacting the way we do our work — the intersection of mental health and mental illness, behavioral health with the criminal justice system.
David Hayes: I'm Dave Hayes. I'm also a candidate for Boulder County Sheriff's Office. I grew up in Denver, came to Louisville the first time in 1977. I stayed for about a year at the police department and went to the Boulder Police Department for about 36 years. About eight years ago, I left as a deputy chief in Boulder and became the chief of police in Louisville. In addition to being the chief of police at Louisville, I'm also the president-elect in the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police. I take that office in July of this year.
While at the Boulder Police Department, I spent a number of years in professional standards, which meant, at the time, internal affairs. So I dealt with a lot of people, a lot of complaints, a lot of concerns. Got very good at that. And we investigated the things that we needed to investigate. Certainly equity's at the top of our list.
While in Louisville we implemented a body cam system, long before the state mandate. We were one of the first Boulder County agencies that brought on BolaWrap, which is an alternative to tasers and certainly an alternative to firearms in terms of taking people in crisis in custody. We have an in-house mental health clinician, and also while as the chief of police, we became accredited for the first time in our history by the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police and the County Sheriffs of Colorado.
We have a great relationship with our school system and also a great relationship with our hospitals in Louisville. I spent my career managing fires, floods. Most recently, the Marshall fire. As you may know, both (Johnson) and I lost our homes in Louisville due to the Marshall fire.
We get it. We understand there's not enough funding. There's not enough hospital beds. That's certainly something we have to work on. Maybe not directly a law enforcement issue, but I think as the sheriff, one of the things that you can do is bring people together and don't just leave it until we figure out what we can count on each other for. We're going to take steps, even if they're baby steps, but otherwise we just continue to play a game of whack-a-mole and just keep pushing the problem further down the road.
How will you make sure that Boulder County businesses and residents are informed of safety protocols and resources in their community?
Hayes: Everbridge system is our notification system. It's not without its faults. It's an older system. There's a newer system called iPause, which is really based on the location of the server where you or your phone may be. The Everbridge system also requires that you be at home, or that you have your phone, or that you've registered and it just didn't work as well as it possibly could have.
The other thing that we also need to work on — really at my insistence — we discovered during the Marshall fire that we do not have pre-drawn polygons if we need to do evacuations. So we're in the process of doing that collectively in the east part of the county. We're meeting next week in Lafayette to get that done.
We need to look at lessons learned. We need to figure out a plan for going forward. Next week, Louisville police and Louisville fire, we've invited our other public safety officials, school districts, hospitals to a tabletop exercise next week in Louisville. What did we learn from all this? And what are we going to do differently?
Johnson: The Marshall fire's a great demonstration of how we need to expand our community information regarding disasters across the entire county. A lot of the systems that were put in place originally were focused on the western half of the county where fires traditionally happened. Never in my wildest imagination did I think my home in suburban Louisville would burn to the ground from a wildfire.
It's got to force us to refocus our efforts on how we're going to handle this disaster management. A lot of people don't realize that the Office of Disaster Management that currently exists is funded by Boulder County and the city of Boulder. It serves the city of Boulder and unincorporated Boulder County. The other municipalities have their own emergency managers and that created challenges during the Marshall fire. What I would like to do as sheriff is look at ways to bring other communities under one umbrella, so we have a centralized, coordinated Office of Disaster Management.
What will be your approach to recidivism, the tendency for an offender to repeat offend?
Johnson:I think first you have to look at recidivism at a micro level, not the macro level, as each individual that enters the criminal justice system has different challenges that they face, whether it be behavioral health, housing, employment — all those factors can lead to somebody doing crimes.
The jail, as it stands today, already has a large number of programs designed to help reduce recidivism. At the end of the day, I believe recidivism is best reduced when we can set people up to succeed when they're released from custody. Helping them to find employment, housing and the services they need to overcome their individual challenges. We have to do that on a very individual level.
Hayes: The system is simply failing. As sheriff, one of the things that we need to concentrate on is crime prevention programs that keep people from being victims and also limit opportunities for defendants or would-be defendants from offending.
This also ties back to early education. Years ago when we had a DARE program in our schools, the idea was to get a law enforcement officer in our schools and make sure that we teach kids about the criminal justice system. That's kind of gone by the wayside. So it really starts at an earlier age.
I would certainly continue all the programs that are in the jail. We know, besides medical, dental, we've also gotten the mental health component to all this. So it is a balancing act and it's a balancing act every day.
We have two questions here that I'm going to mashup: the sheriff's office has been in the news for inappropriate taser use and the court has come down on the office. Right after they did, another taser incident occurred. What do you think that says about the culture in the office and what can you tell us about the need for change? Along those lines, there have been more than one instance of aggression when it comes to officers in the jail. What would you do to change the climate in the jail?
Hayes: One of the first things I did becoming chief in Louisville, we established a value-based management system. What guides us? We do three things really well in the Louisville police department: we investigate beyond the obvious, we make things better than we found them, and we don't care about race, ethnicity, sex, sexual preference, and certainly don't care about anybody's immigration status. We provide Constitutional policing, period.
What (the tasing incidents) suggest to me is that there needs to be some cultural adjustment in the sheriff's office. By and large they're good men, good women working in the department. Those incidents, although few, if you want to count them on one hand — what they would suggest is it's time for a culture change and there needs to be some kind of reset.
What I would do is what we've done at Louisville, when we've made a policy change — we had an officer involved shooting. I sat down with each and every employee. One-on-one and in a group setting and we talked about why we were making a policy change and what the expectations were.
Johnson: After a significant policy change in the jail, the second incident of tasing someone at the restraint chair occurred and that was outside of policy and was addressed quickly. That individual, the employee, actually was reported by other employees as having done it, which is a positive for the culture, that they're willing to hold their peers accountable to report this behavior.
While there is some culture of accountability on the back end, there may be a need for a culture change within the organization about how we treat people. Having just looked at the most recent use of force data for the jail, I can tell you that taser use in the jail, following the policy change and following the incident where the employee was terminated and prosecuted, has dropped dramatically, which is a good thing. People in full restraints should not have a taser used upon them. I do believe there is time to review policy and review how the jail operates.
Boulder County residents feel less safe than they did in the past. Lawbreakers are not being held accountable due to limited jail space. Some are serious repeat offenders. What will you do to improve the situation?
Hayes: Certainly COVID has had a lot to do with that, but I can tell you that we still have folks that are wanted for felony warrants that cannot be taken to the jail. The other day, we contacted an individual that was intoxicated in front of a business, just laying on the ground — I think he had 14 warrants. Boulder County and Broomfield County, neither of the jails would take him. What I will figure out as the sheriff is what's the better way to do this. Maybe at the very least, we bring these individuals into the jail, have the judge talk to him, set some additional bond conditions, order them into treatment.
If you don't have a defendant, you don't have a victim. So you could be the victim of a crime now in Boulder County and because the defendant can't go to the jail, can't be arrested on a warrant, he or she holds the whole system hostage. If you're a victim, you're just kind of waiting and wondering, and absolutely it creates a feeling of unsafeness in a community.
Johnson: I gotta tell you, it's not good. Right now, we've got more COVID cases again back in the jail, which means we have to be very careful about the number of people we bring into the jail. We also have a criminal justice system that for almost two years has been stopped and literally plugged up. The holding spot for that is currently the Boulder County jail. That creates a giant backlog. I'm afraid that it's going to take 18 months or two years to clean it up. It's a challenge for us.
It's a challenge for the district attorney office. It's a challenge for the judges. Until we can figure out a way to get cases accelerated through the system, jail space is going to be very hard to come by.
Closing remarks
Hayes: I would encourage you to look at my website. I think what you'll see is that I'm a proven leader with proven accomplishments throughout my career, both at Boulder and at Louisville. I'm the only candidate with executive law enforcement experience as police chief in Louisville for the last eight years.
We need a contemporary value-based management system and use transparency. We need to be collaborative. What we're going to be about is going to be safety, community and quality of life.
Johnson: I'm in a very unique position right now where I have spent a significant part of my career in policing the city of Boulder, but I've also had the last 15 months of my life working under Joe Pelle and learning the ins and outs of the sheriff's office and figuring out from an outsider's perspective, what needs to change moving forward and where there are opportunities to advance the organization.
I've spent the last nine months building relationships with elected leaders and other leaders in this community because I believe it is critically important as sheriff to build and maintain those relationships to advocate for our community and most importantly, to keep Boulder County, the safe and vibrant community that we all want it to be.
