CITY'S NEW TOP COP ROLLS UP HIS SLEEVES

Fresh from a meeting with the mayor, Gerry Whitman
heads for the elevator and reaches the door just a split-second before
it closes in front of him. Without hesitation, he wedges his foot into
the breach.

"High-risk move," he jokes, as the door opens wide.

Whitman, Denver's new police chief, knows opening doors is just one of
many moves he must make to restore public confidence in a department
besieged lately by controversy.

Add to that a list of key initiatives: closer oversight and tighter
discipline throughout the ranks; a "core group" of internal
investigators who can quickly get to the bottom of controversy; a
revision of the massive police manual - and officers' commitment of
essential policies to memory.

"I'm aware of all the internal complaints you know about, plus the
ones I know about, and I don't see a corrupt police department,"
Whitman says. "What I see are situations and some systems that need to
be changed.

"We need to handle (incidents) aggressively and investigate completely
so we can give an answer to the community. It frustrates me to watch
these things go wild."

Whitman, who served as interim chief for five months after previous
chief Tom Sanchez was fired, doesn't stand alone in his frustration
and concern.

Incoming Manager of Safety Ari Zavaras, who starts that job Tuesday,
nine years to the day since retiring as police chief, also
acknowledges the damage done by a succession of episodes spanning the
past 10 months.

- - A "no-knock" drug raid on the wrong house left Mexican national
Ismael Mena dead and the officer who secured the warrant accused of
perjury.

- - Police recruit Ellis Johnson was admitted to the academy even though
he'd acknowledged drug use, stealing from his employer and domestic
violence.

- - Sanchez lost his job shortly after he flew off to Hawaii while the
Mena controversy roiled.

- - An officer brought an illegal, sawed-off shotgun to the police
property bureau for destruction, but refused to reveal the gun's owner.

- - Two officers were charged with destroying evidence in more than 80
drug cases, and one of those officers also was accused of demanding
$70 from a man he was ticketing in a LoDo bar.

- - Nearly $100,000 was stolen from the police property bureau in what
was believed to be an inside job.

- - At an RTD bus terminal, Boulder police found 4.8 grams of crystal
methamphetamine in a backpack linked to a Denver police officer.

- - Ten months after the Mena incident, investigators learned that
Colorado Rockies player Mike Lansing was a ride-along witness, yet was
never asked for a statement.

"I've never seen a department take so many hits in rapid succession,"
says Zavaras. "It's hard to say what's the driving force behind it.
Some issues you see are isolated, like the Boulder situation with the
drugs and the backpack.

"But other times, you have to look at the command structure, because
they seem to be re-occurring." He doesn't want to make any blanket
pronouncements after nearly a decade away from the department, but he
can't help but wonder if discipline has lapsed.

"I don't know that it's been lax," Zavaras says. "But it's given the
appearance of that."

The rank and file - people like technician Mark Novotny, a school
resource officer - don't like hearing the litany of police problems
any more than the brass.

"It's embarrassing to read this stuff in the paper about the
department," Novotny says. "I'm proud that I'm a cop. It's a great
job. But it's hard when my neighbors ask me about what they read in
the papers."

But John Lietz, an officer in District 4, thinks the Zavaras-Whitman
combination could reverse the trend.

"I certainly have all the faith in the world in their attempt to move
in the right direction," he says. "I'm not saying they can solve
everything, but they can give it a good try. I think they can solve
the majority of the problems."

Mayor Wellington Webb, equally concerned that public perception of his
police department has taken some serious hits, says he wants to change
the impression that the department tries to hide its mistakes.

"Any time there's discipline involved, we say it's a personnel
decision (and closed to the public)," Webb says. "We have to find a
way to let the public know that we discipline people who do wrong."

Whitman, an 18-year-veteran of the department, has advocated more
openness from the day he took over as interim chief. But internal
accountability looms as his primary concern - a tightening of controls
that extends throughout the command structure.

"Coming up through the ranks, you see the perception that patrol
officers are more accountable than staff," he says. "I want to extend
that accountability." One practical step toward tighter discipline:
overhaul a police operations manual, an encyclopedic, inches-thick
binder that periodically bloats with sudden additions.

Whitman's own changes in ride-along procedure, a reaction to the
Lansing incident, were the last pages slipped into the rings.

"This needs to be put into a useable format," he says. "Anything
having to do with high risk needs to be up front - and has to be
memorized." He wants pocket-sized editions of the manual, computer
disk copies, Internet access. But first, he says, his staff will "pick
it apart," pulling out critical policies and revising them regularly
to reflect, among other things, evolving case law.

Whitman says he'd also like to improve the speed and efficiency with
which he can get to the bottom of difficult internal incidents.

"I'd like a core group of people who could handle sensitive
investigations," he says, "some of which could be law violations.
Internal Affairs has a volume issue."

Whitman's vision of departmental integrity is tied up with many
practical aspects of police work - supervisor-to-officer ratios,
efficient auditing and, one of the chief's recurring themes,
information technology.

The current system of tracking incidents - including high-speed
chases, wrecked cruisers, repeated complaints of excessive force - are
unwieldy and inefficient paper chases, Whitman says.

He sees technology translating to accountability - and to tighter
discipline, integrity and public confidence.

"When you tie the systems together, people can be flagged on a
day-to-day basis," Whitman says. "Confidence from the community comes
when they know those things are in place." To that end, both Whitman
and Zavaras hope to move ahead with an exhaustive - and, at $390,000,
expensive - organizational assessment by outside professionals. The
proposal has encountered some initial opposition from the City Council.

"If we're going to fast-track things and have broad-based
modernization," Whitman says, "we need outside help." For some ideas,
Whitman has looked to a report on the recent Rampart scandal that
rocked the Los Angeles Police Department. The scope of the LAPD
trouble may be in another league from Denver's problems, but an
exhaustive examination of police practices revealed one particularly
useful finding about the mechanics of discipline.

The report recommended one supervisor for eight to 10 people. In
Denver, Whitman says, the ratio can be as high as 1-to-12.

"Supervisors can't be tied down to administration," he says.
"Basically, I want sergeants on the street."

The mayor lays some of the blame for bad apples on a system of
discipline - and specifically, the appeals process - that doesn't
always weed out problems.

"There are individuals who shouldn't be there, people whoM former
chiefs have tried to get rid of, who were reinstated," Webb says.
"Laws of discipline have to be changed without archaic rules of
comparative standards."

In one well-publicized case, officer Matthew D. Graves pleaded guilty
to misdemeanor assault after a 1996 incident in which a video camera
caught him pointing a gun at the head of a woman arrested in a
domestic dispute.

Then-Chief David Michaud fired Graves, but the Civil Service
Commission reduced the penalty to a one-year suspension and ordered
him reinstated, with the rationale that other officers had received
less punishment for worse mistakes.

The mayor also expressed frustration that legal concerns over privacy
issues often conflict with the openness he would like to see
associated with the police department.

"You've got outside lawyers sending different advice about the role of
privacy for individual officers," Webb says. "It's a fine line we walk
on these issues." Whitman, too, wants more openness in the department.
But first, he needs to fine-tune the systems of internal
accountability.

"I need to be able to answer my boss when he asks, "What did you do to
prevent this?'- " Whitman says. "I'm an order kind of guy, I want
things organized, in place.

"My confidence in this police department is not shaken."