Boulder oversight panel says police directive changed complaint classifications without notice

Boulder Police Oversight Panel members said a police directive changed how some complaints were classified, including complaints involving use of force deemed within policy, without notice to the panel or public. Members said the directive took effect Nov. 1, 2025, and was paused in July 2026, at the panel’s Nov. 9 meeting.

Members described the directive as changing seven complaint-classification criteria. They said the changes could limit which cases are escalated for panel review; one member also said fewer cases had come before the panel. Those were members’ accounts of the directive’s effects, and the panel took no formal action on it at the meeting.

The city’s published General Order 120, dated Jan. 9, 2025, assigns the independent police monitor responsibility for classifying complaints and describes preliminary review and possible resolution of some cases.

Panel members said the directive had not been shared with them and was not clear to the public. They asked the police department to routinely provide future directives to the panel. Members said the police chief had promised to improve transparency and appeared open to sharing directives, but no formal process was approved. The request concerned sharing with the panel; the meeting did not establish a separate process for notifying the public.

The panel also discussed three community-complaint cases that a co-chair said were stalled because the police department disputed the monitor’s classifications. One case was at least 18 months old, the co-chair said, but gave no case-by-case updates. Separately, the monitor said three performance-and-conduct reviews from July or earlier had not reached her queue and that she did not know why. The meeting did not establish whether those were the same cases.