August 17, 2001

To The Editor
The Denver Post

1560 Broadway
Denver, CO, 80202

The discipline given to a Lakewood Police officer for leaving a message that was interpreted as a threat, The Denver Post, page2B, Friday, August 17, 2001, has sent a very bad message to the rest of us, as well as other police officers.

The Lakewood police officer was sticking his neck out for a woman he believed could be in danger of physical harm. The fact that he left a message he knew was being recorded should be sufficient evidence of a lack of malicious intent on his part.

The article indicates that the officer was punished for "a poor choice of words." Given the choice of words in the threat allegedly made by Richard Lucero after a minor traffic accident involving Ron Norris and his wife, my choice of words would have been on a par with those used by the officer.

If anyone thinks that police officers don't occasionally advise suspects of their rights… in a rather unofficial but generally effective way… in order to head off further bad acts, they've been watching too many Adam-12 reruns and not enough episodes of Adam-12.

I don't mean to minimize the seriousness of this matter, but cops live in a real world of real violence.. As a former investigator for the Denver County and Jefferson County District Attorneys' Offices, I'm not unfamiliar with how much cops will stick out their necks for a potential victim of criminal activity when they need to do so.

Maybe there was no way to avoid an official response to this incident once it was made public by the well-intentioned, but misguided actions of a television reporter, who never may have been closer to violence than the outside of a line of yellow police tape, but the rest of us can only hope that other cops, perhaps using a "better choice of words," will not

Rick Johnson
Rick Johnson & Associates of Colorado, Inc.
1649 Downing Street, Denver, CO, 80218
rick@denverpi.com