More than a decade ago in Los Angeles, hundreds of people protested in the streets after police killed a man in a controversial shooting. The crowd rolled dumpsters down a hill into police cars, threw air conditioners out of windows, hurled rocks and bottles at officers. As he responded from a neighboring district to help, Blake Chow, then a commander with the Los Angeles Police Department, spotted Todd Chamberlain, a LAPD captain, also arriving on scene, and felt a wave of relief. “When I got there and saw Todd, I knew we were going to get control of it and calm everything down,” Chow, now an assistant chief with the LAPD, said in an interview last week. “I had so much confidence in him.” Now, Aurora officials hope Chamberlain can bring a similar calm leadership to the Aurora Police Department, where Chamberlain was sworn in as chief earlier this month. He is the sixth chief in five years to take the helm at the troubled agency, and does so after a 35-year career in California law enforcement. Chamberlain outlined his goals in an interview with The Denver Post last week, on his ninth day as chief. He hopes to stabilize the police department and solidify reforms to move the agency out from under court-ordered oversight. He wants to decrease overall crime in Aurora, lower internal and external complaints against officers, and build trust as a leader both with the community and within the department. “It’s not just, can we get out of this consent decree, but how can we get out of it and make sure we never fall back into it?” he said of the court-ordered reform put in place after the death of Elijah McClain when a state investigation found a pattern of racially biased policing in Aurora. The 62-year-old’s hiring — done behind closed doors with no community input — was met with cautious optimism from both the police union and community members. Omar Montgomery, president of the Aurora branch of the NAACP, said the chief seemed attentive, direct and willing to learn in a one-on-one meeting this week. “For each question I asked, I didn’t feel like it was a cookie-cutter answer he just pulled from somewhere,” Montgomery said. “It felt like he was sincere.” But he’s felt similarly about past chiefs only to be disappointed. “I had hopes for a few of them,” he said, “and unfortunately it didn’t work out.” Three decades of police work Chamberlain believes his more than three decades of experience in law enforcement will be an asset in a police department where 42% of employees have spent less than six years on the job amid a stint of short-term, controversial chiefs. “When you look at Aurora, it’s a very, very young department,” he said. “And I’ll bet you a lot of these officers don’t have a lot of knowledge about things that occurred even in Aurora.” Chamberlain said he brings a long view of policing to the job that considers how the profession has evolved and why it’s been criticized over the years. “I’m very cognizant about not over-policing. Because we can go over there, we can saturate (a) place, we can have armored cars go in, we can stop everybody who’s walking, we can cite people, we can make their lives miserable, and crime will go down — but the community will also hate us,” he said, adding that he was part of such an approach in L.A. in the early 1990s. “…So for me,” he added, “that’s the big part that I can bring here, is a knowledge of the past which I don’t think many people have, not only in this agency, but in a lot of agencies.” During his LAPD career, Chamberlain helped the police department gain a foothold in a public housing complex that was largely under the control of a gang around 2007, Chow said. Gang members in the 498-home complex, Ramona Gardens, blocked kids from using the development’s recreation center and enforced their rules with violence. City service providers rarely ventured into the geographically isolated area, and residents there did not trust police officers, Chow said. Chamberlain set up a series of meetings between residents and police in the complex’s recreation center aimed at building a better relationship between officers and residents, Chow said. At the first meeting, gang members filled the entire back row of seats, trying to intimidate residents, he said. “Todd started on one end and worked his way down to the other end of this line of gang members and shook each of their hands,” Chow said. As the meetings went on, more community members showed up and fewer gang members did, Chow said, until the community seemed to reach a tipping point and slipped toward stability. Lou Calanche, who grew up in Ramona Gardens and founded a nonprofit aimed at improving the area, worked closely with Chow and Chamberlain during that two-year push, which left some residents feeling the police presence in the area was suffocating. She said the two captains listened to the community in a way police never had before. “Because of the suppression and the community pushing back, most of the time the community wasn’t taken seriously,” she said. “It was like, ‘No, you guys just don’t want us here.’ But with them — there was an issue where there was a gang sergeant who was just not community-friendly. And one of the things the captains did was bring in a different sergeant. And that usually doesn’t happen.” She said the police effort to clean up the gangs was followed by increased city investment in Ramona Gardens, and the area is now much different. “Their way of seeing things really helped to shape the direction and how we wanted to work with the community,” she said. “If they weren’t there, it might have not gone as well as it did.” Todd Chamberlain speaks during a news conference at which he was introduced as the new Aurora Police Department chief Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024 at the Aurora Municipal Center. (Photo by Daniel Brenner/Special to The Denver Post) Tren de Aragua Chamberlain took office in Colorado amid claims of another gang takeover — that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had seized control of several Aurora apartment buildings run by a single property management company this summer. The claims started with the property management company and were quickly escalated to a national audience by conservative influencers and politicians, culminating when former President Donald Trump falsely said immigrants were “taking over the towns” and vowed to visit Aurora. Aurora police have acknowledged that Tren de Aragua members are operating in a limited capacity in the city, including at some of the highlighted apartment complexes, which have been under fire from residents and city inspectors for years because of poor living conditions. Police have arrested at least nine men connected to the gang for alleged crimes ranging from shootings to domestic violence. But Chamberlain said Tren de Aragua is not the “biggest, baddest gang in Aurora.” The city last year recorded 36 gangs with more than 1,300 members in the city. “The hysteria that has been going on across the nation, again, I don’t think it’s valid,” Chamberlain said. “But on that same token, there are huge issues that, if this is not corrected quickly and if it’s not addressed quickly, it can become much, much more problematic.” Police are taking immediate and proactive efforts to further curb the gang’s presence, he said. “This is not a immigrant/non-immigrant issue,” Chamberlain said. “This is about individuals that have come to the city of Aurora and are victimizing others and hurting others, and I don’t care what their status is, undocumented, documented — if they are committing crimes, they are going to be held accountable.” Building trust Chamberlain traded his surfboard for a paddleboard when he moved to Colorado and accepted the chief position and its $250,000 salary. The married father-of-three is still living out of boxes in his new Aurora home. “It’s like I’m 21 again and it’s absolutely miserable,” he said, adding that though he surfed for a decade he was never particularly good at it. “I go out, I flop around, I paddle out and I just enjoy being out there,” he said. Related Articles Crime and Public Safety | Police identify 3 suspects from viral video of armed men entering Aurora apartment; no evidence of gang ties Crime and Public Safety | New Aurora police chief vows to build trust amid criticism of opaque hiring process: “I’m here for the long haul” Crime and Public Safety | Former Los Angeles police commander selected as next Aurora police chief Looking forward, he wants to use data and statistics to guide Aurora’s policing, he said. He’d like to reestablish a system to review all officers’ body-worn camera footage — preliminary results from an academic study this fall showed unprofessionalism at the police department plummeted 57% when the agency had such a system in place last year — but said he doesn’t yet have a timeline for doing so. Officer misconduct — like the officer who passed out drunk behind the wheel of a police car in 2019 and was later promoted — will not be acceptable, Chamberlain said. “I want to be very clear on what are our expectations are from the very beginning and make sure that starts not only with my command staff, but it trickles all the way down to the officers in uniform,” he said. “As far as the misconduct that you mentioned, you know, officers drunk in cars and things like that, that’s not going to be tolerated. I have no space, I have no time for that type of officer.” Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.