The State Where Protests Have Already Forced Major Police Reform

In Loveland, Colorado—the nation’s self-proclaimed “Sweetheart City,” about an hour’s drive north of Denver—a young police officer paused earlier this month as he was arresting a pregnant woman who had outstanding warrants. Should he handcuff her, the officer asked his supervisors, or, under a new Colorado policing law, would that now be considered excessive force?

To officers like Rob Pride, a Loveland patrol sergeant who relayed that example to me last week, that kind of hesitation is the most worrisome part of the first-in-the-nation police-reform law that Colorado enacted on June 13. To the bill’s supporters, however, the young officer’s pause is precisely the goal.

Barely a month has passed since Colorado legislators raced to approve the as protesters marched and chanted outside the state capitol in Denver. The demonstrators demanded justice for George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man killed by police in Minneapolis, and for Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man whose death at the hands of police nine months earlier in a Denver suburb attracted no national outcry at the time, but has received fresh attention this summer.