APD Chief Todd Chamberlain has crime down. He counts it in victims protected

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

An Aurora police officer could run a plate, confirm the car was stolen, flip on the lights and siren, and then watch the driver hit the gas. Under the policy the officer had one move. Shut the lights off and go the other way.

That was the policy when Todd Chamberlain was sworn in as Aurora’s police chief in September 2024.

“And if the person sped away, all they would do was turn off their lights and sirens and go another direction,” Chamberlain said in an Oct. 19 interview with RMV. “And that was part of their policy.”

He changed it effective March 5, 2025.

“I have a problem when it became normalized that someone could steal a car and then just get away with it by driving away,” he said.

His argument for the change was not about cars.

“These cars aren’t getting stolen just for stealing cars,” he said. “We have found murder suspects, homicide suspects that have been in these vehicles, burglary suspects. We have found everything that you could find driving around in these stolen cars.” Without the policy change, he said, “those individuals would still be out victimizing other people.”

He does not describe the change as risk-free.

“It is a high risk situation,” he said. He said it took training and oversight.

Motor vehicle theft in Aurora peaked at 6,781 in 2022. It was 3,621 in 2024 and 2,067 last year, according to the department’s public crime data.

Two years into the job, Chamberlain is the man a group of activists sat at city hall past 2 a.m. trying to get fired.

The job as he describes it

Chamberlain describes the job in three parts.

“Our role is to maintain social order,” he said. “It’s to reduce victimization and it’s to hold those who victimize accountable.”

He says that is the part missing from most of the argument around policing.

“There’s a lot of people in state legislation right now. There’s a lot of people in local government who never bring up the victims,” he said.

He counts them. Chamberlain puts the reduction at 9,514 fewer victims over his two years. The department put the figure at 7,816 in July.

“They are sometimes the forgotten people,” he said.

What the numbers show

Homicides in Aurora ran 41 in 2022, 38 in 2023, 35 in 2024 and 30 last year, according to the department’s incident data.

Robbery fell from 859 to 362 over the same period. Burglary dropped from 1,688 to 962. Total reported crime went from 20,103 in 2022 to 12,710 last year.

From 2024 to 2025, larceny fell 14.2 percent, aggravated assault 12 percent and sex offenses 3.9 percent. No major category rose.

Statewide, reported violent crime fell from 31,584 to 28,212 from 2024 to 2025, a drop of 10.7 percent, according to the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice. Aurora’s fell 17.8 percent in the same table.

Chamberlain credits hot spot policing and what he calls an evidence-based approach, built on identifying “who is most likely to become a victim, and then addressing that.”

The Edge at Lowry

By the time he arrived, the Edge at Lowry, an apartment complex at 12th and Dallas, was a national story about Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang known as TdA, taking over an American city. The people the gang was taxing got less attention.

“The crime that was occurring was primarily on the individuals that were from that same country, from Venezuela,” Chamberlain said. “They were taxed. So they would pay their rent and then they’d be taxed again by TdA.”

He walked the property on his second day. Eleven days into the job he declared the complex a criminal nuisance. The city sent crews to clear the trash and went after the landlord.

The case that put it in a courtroom came that December. Just before 2:30 in the morning, 13 to 15 people, most of them men, broke into an apartment at the Edge, moved a Venezuelan couple into a second apartment and bound and beat them. The man was stabbed.

Chamberlain said the preliminary finding was “100% gang activity.”

Police detained 14 people that morning and 16 in all. Twelve were charged, and the counts include second-degree kidnapping, first-degree assault, aggravated robbery, second-degree burglary and menacing.

They include extortion.

The complex sits in Del Mar Parkway, the neighborhood running from the Denver line east along the south side of East Colfax. Reported crime there fell 30.4 percent from 2024 to 2025, the year the city shut it down, against 21.9 percent citywide, according to an RMV analysis of the department’s incident data. Aggravated assault fell 33.2 percent and larceny 28.1 percent.

The city relocated 85 residents from 23 units when it closed.

He said the department addressed it by “focusing on the individuals that are causing the problem, building the community trust with that particular community and letting them know that they can tell us what is occurring.”

He does not describe the problem as finished.

“We still have a TdA issue,” he said. “Any other major city has gang problems. We still have those, but we have focused on those systematically.”

The people at city hall

Protesters have come to every Aurora council meeting for more than two years over Kilyn Lewis, an unarmed Black man an Aurora SWAT officer shot and killed on May 23, 2024, and other Black people killed by police.

Officers were serving a warrant for attempted first-degree murder. Lewis was holding a cell phone.

That was three and a half months before Chamberlain was sworn in. A grand jury declined to accept the case and the district attorney declined to charge the officer.

On Oct. 12 the meeting ran until about 2:30 a.m. while MiDian Shofner, chief executive of the Epitome of Black Excellence, said she would not leave until the city agreed to fire Chamberlain.

City Manager Jason Batchelor met her and said the firing would not happen.

Officers escorted Shofner out and issued her a summons for municipal trespassing.

Asked whether there was anything they wanted that he would give them, Chamberlain went back to the same place.

“Everybody has a right to an opinion. Everybody has a right to, you know, fight for what they feel is necessary. And so do I,” he said. “And my right is to fight for the victims.”

An Aurora officer shot Rajon Belt-Stubblefield during a traffic stop on Aug. 30, 2025. Three days later Chamberlain defended the officer at a news conference.

A grand jury indicted Officer Matthew Neely on second-degree murder and manslaughter. The district attorney’s office announced the charges on Aug. 3.

Under the decree

The department has been under a state consent decree since 2022, entered after the Colorado attorney general found the year before that it had a pattern and practice of using force excessively, disproportionately against people of color and people in mental health crises.

An outside monitor grades the city against the decree and reports to a judge. His latest report came out on Oct. 15.

Chamberlain does not treat the decree as the measure of the department.

He called it “only a very small part of what we are doing” and said its requirements “are just good business practices.” He said the department has done work “far beyond anything that was even requested or asked in the consent decree.”

The department did not wait for the Belt-Stubblefield case to finish. It rewrote its less-lethal policy to require officers on certain assignments to carry a stun gun, which the monitor calls “an immediate corrective measure based on lessons learned from the August 30, 2025” officer-involved shooting.

Fifty of the 63 mandates still being graded are now in substantial compliance, up from 48 at the last report. None sit on a cautionary track.

The decree requires the city to post public information on how officers use force. The department’s latest annual report recorded 756 uses of force in 2023, 674 in 2024 and 655 last year.

Most of what that word covers is not what it suggests.

Force is logged at three levels, and the lowest is defined in department policy as “actions taken to control a subject that are neither likely nor intended to cause injury.” It accounted for 501 of last year’s 655 reports, better than three in four. Lethal-level force accounted for six.

Under the same policy, escorting or handcuffing someone who is cooperating is not a use of force at all. A wristlock on someone who is resisting is one, and it goes in the total.

Officer-involved shootings went from five in 2024 and five in 2025 to one through September this year. The monitor called that infrequency encouraging while cautioning that incident counts alone do not establish that the reforms are working.

By Jan. 30 the monitor must tell the court whether Aurora has substantially complied with what is left. The decree cannot end before May 1, 2027, and he has written that the date is not an automatic one.

The next three years

Asked what comes next, Chamberlain said he is already working on goals for 2027 and a three-year plan.

“In law enforcement, there’s never a time where you really get to spike the football in the end zone and say it’s done,” he said.

The group demanding his job has not changed how he intends to do it.

“I am going to continue to deliver the facts and the data-driven information now until the time I step out of this chair, because it’s having an impact on the safety of this community,” he said.