Many of the highest-profile examples of Aurora police involved in misconduct and controversy — which have turned Aurora into the nexus of Colorado’s police reform debate — are absent from the Colorado Peace Officer Standards and Training database.
For some Aurora Police Department cops whose misconduct doesn’t appear in the database, it’s simply a matter of their behavior predating the board’s reporting period of 2022 and forward. For others, investigative failures and unprosecuted criminal conduct mean their publicly-visible disciplinary records don’t reflect their misbehavior, which has damaged the public’s trust in APD.
In March 2019, Aurora police officer Nate Meier made national headlines when first responders dragged him — drunk and unconscious — out of his unmarked police vehicle, which was stalled on a busy road.
The department decided not to investigate the incident as a crime, even though one responding officer commented on Meier being “a little intoxicated,” and Meier admitted to blacking out while drinking vodka earlier in the day
District Attorney George Brauchler said the failure by police to investigate Meier meant his office did not have enough evidence to prosecute him for drunken driving. Meier was suspended and demoted but kept his job and earned a promotion to the rank of agent earlier this year.
Even the most passionate defenders of the department have expressed discomfort when asked about Meier’s employment status. Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky — who was endorsed by both of Aurora’s police unions during her run for office in 2021 — said earlier this year that she was “never going to stand up for an officer like Nate Meier.”
But since Meier was never decertified, and since his on-duty drunkenness in 2019 happened prior to POST launching its database in 2022, his POST profile only says that he is a certified peace officer employed by the Aurora Police Department with no reportable disciplinary actions to his name.
Another pair of Aurora cops with deceptively clean POST profiles, John Haubert and Francine Martinez, were criminally charged in 2021 after Haubert pistol-whipped and strangled a man suspected of trespassing while Martinez stood by and watched without intervening.