Complaint History & Business Rating for Arvada Police Dept

Kay C. says: Arvada PD has a school resource officer at Three Creeks who is unethical and dishonest. Officer D. does not try to listen and understand what families have to say, coming into situations with assumptions she tries to prove true without any evidence or proof of them being true. She wasn't interested in learning the truth, she was interested in finding ANYTHING she could to write a citation about, regardless of the destruction it could cause to the family. She makes hasty decisions without doing thorough investigations, not reading paperwork provided to the child's school or exploring his history or why he might have made the statements he did. She frightened our children with her leading investigative tactics, resulting in two of them being on anxiety medications and having nightmares about police. She ignored two people who told her about our child's tendency to tell stories, neglecting to explore this fact with his parents. She writes senseless citations that could cost people their careers without even a second thought about the ways she might be damaging parents' ability to provide for their family. She uses the common police tactic of lying to people trying to elicit confessions; there is evidence of this in her police report (had there been a mark on my child's forehead like she claimed was there, it would have been stated in the police report and there would have been pictures to prove it). She puts duress on people who have never had any interaction with the law, making them extremely nervous, asking the same questions over and over until she can claim something said out of nervousness is a "confession." She interrogates parents in front of their children, breeding a mistrust of law enforcement in children old enough to understand what was happening. She does not understand how people on the spectrum present differently than an officer might expect. Law enforcement should be mindful of their power and use it wisely, not writing child abuse citations when there is literally not a single mark on a child, no legal history for the parents, and the children don't show ANY signs of being beaten or abused. Children are notorious for saying the darndest things, and this officer didn't use a single ounce of common sense in looking at the whole picture. She actually exacerbated a child's attachment issues with the major trauma she created for our family under the pretense of protecting him. Do not trust Arvada PD to do child abuse investigations; they aren't trained to do so. Tell them to come back with a warrant and request that the trained and licenses people at DCHS do the investigation instead; ironically, these two departments are not on the same page, and the DCHS worker ascertained that there was no evidence of abuse in our home. How can two state agencies come to two totally different conclusions about the same scenario? One has employees trained and licensed to do child abuse investigations; the other has armed officers with badges trained to interact with criminals, NOT children and families. Abuse of power can have a profound impact on innocent children and families.