Mark Tyson
Member
Denver Post
Article Published: Sunday, September 21, 2003
'The Animals'
To fight skyrocketing crime, the Denver Police Department in1986 started a unique recruitment and training program - one that has not been used since - to help return order to the streets.
By David Migoya
Denver Post Staff Writer
It was 1986, and Denver was in trouble.
The crime rate was soaring. Homicides were occuring at a record pace.
The Police Department needed help.
"We were in bad economic times, the oil patch went south, the budget went to hell and we were having to make do with fewer cops," remembered J.D. MacFarlane, the city's manager of safety at the time. "The community wanted aggressive police officers."
What they got were "The Animals."
The 40 recruits who filled the Denver Police Academy that fall earned the nickname from veteran officers because of their collective size, strength and attitude.
And over the years, the group galvanized their reputation for toughness through heroism and sacrifice - but also by amassing an unmatched record of shootings and killings.
Fourteen officers from the class have been involved in the wounding or deaths of 14 people, 13 of them by gunfire, according to an analysis of police records by The Denver Post.
That number would be even higher had some of the officers not fired and missed, or chosen not to shoot because their line of fire was blocked, according to records and interviews.
The group with the next highest number of shooting incidents - eight - is a 1995 academy class. Tied for third highest, with six, is a 1982 class, some of whom either helped train members of 1986-2, as "The Animals" were officially called, or fired their weapons alongside them years later, records show.
"To have one particular class with an unusually high number of shootings can't just be an anomaly or aberration," said Ken Cooper, director of Tactical Handgun Training, a firearms training academy in Kingston, N.Y. "Maybe it's a combination of things. Were they oversensitized to the dangers of the streets, or saw so many get hurt on the job that suddenly everyone looked like a potential killer of cops to them?"
Theories vary on why one class could have so many more shootings than others, but Cooper and other experts said they are not aware of any study that correlates gunfire to academy classes.
"One possibility is that this is just an ill-fated class," said Hans Toch, a criminal justice professor at the State University of New York at Albany who has studied Denver police shootings and testified at several trials that resulted from them. "Or, they merely ran into a disproportionate number of incidents."
The Post looked at all police shootings since 1980 following the death of Paul Childs, a 15-year-old mentally handicapped youth who was killed in July by officer Jim Turney when Childs did not drop a knife.
Turney is a 1998 graduate of the academy and only the third of his class to draw his weapon and fire. It was his second fatal shooting in as many years, and officials haven't yet determined whether it was justified.
Members of the class of '86, their trainers and police brass were not aware of the group's record of gunfire until told by The Post. The department doesn't track police shootings that way.
"I don't have any explanation for it," said Chief Gerry Whitman, who helped train some of the officers from 1986-2. "We've never tracked class patterns before."
That's changing, though. An academy class from last year is part of a long-term study to monitor their experiences, Whitman said.
The department ultimately said that each of the shootings by the class of '86 was justified. And while insisting that the members of the class were far from trigger-happy, several people who were involved with the class - from administrators who tested and selected them to the officers themselves - offered possible explanations for the number of incidents, including:
It was the first - and only - group in nearly two decades to be chosen from a battery of entrance exams that included a graded physical agility test. Doing well likely meant a job.
It was the first of two classes to divide training between the classroom and the streets, part of what class trainers now say was an ill-conceived effort to get officers on the job quickly. The group received 11 weeks of field training, dubbed "street survival," after just 11 weeks at the academy.
The recruits became more aware than most of the dangers they faced. Five law enforcement officers were killed in Colorado during the group's first year - two of them Denver officers - the most to die during the training of any academy class in more than a half-century, The Post found.
Some in the class say the experiences and training galvanized them to be assertive but careful cops at a time when crack cocaine and street gangs were emerging in Denver. Others described it as a thrill ride.
"When we came on, it was a particularly violent time in Denver, very much the Wild West with shots fired all over the place," said Jeffrey Rawson, a class of '86 graduate and now a police officer in Clearwater, Fla. He left Denver 13 years ago without shooting anyone during his time here.
"It was exciting as hell. Violent, but we were out there to take care of that."
Said MacFarlane, the manager of safety who hired the recruits: "They were there to move the crud off the streets."
'Big, BIG guys'
As the newly minted Denver police recruit stepped from the cruiser, the woman who had called for the police peered upward at him.
He was tall, muscular, imposing - precisely what Denver wanted its new police officers to look like.
"Where did you find this one?" the astonished woman is said to have asked the recruit's training officer, who had driven the car.
The senior officer smiled.
"We made him," was the semi-serious reply.
At the time the class of '86 was being recruited, many Denver police officers were a little pudgier than commanders liked, and not as aggressive about crime as the community thought they needed to be, several former police administrators said.
"With the crime rate and everything going on, and the pressures to do something about it, the city actively went out ... and selected officers that fit the need of the times," said Lt. Vincent Gavito, a member of the academy class that began its training in November 1986. "They wanted people who could go out there and fit the profile of doing police work."
What they got were 39 men and one woman who were faster, more agile and smarter than many police recruits who preceded them. The class included bodybuilders, football players, karate experts, gymnasts, competitive firearms experts, and civilian and military police officers, according to records and interviews.
From their ranks have come some headline-grabbing names noted for their heroics or escapades: VanderJagt, Blake, Gavito, Murawski, O'Shea.
"Our nickname became 'The Animals' from the other cops," said Michael Lohr, who resigned from the group before graduation and took a job with the Denver Water Department. "There were some really big physical specimens. The way they scored the physical agility exam, the bigger guys figured in there."
For the first time in 20 years, the Civil Service Commission, the agency that tests police applicants, administered a physical agility exam. The idea was to find the most physically fit applicants.
"There were many, many people in the department at that time who were overweight, smoked or were on disability constantly," remembered Maria Valdes, former executive director of the commission. "We were interested in moving from a paper-and-pencil thing to a more comprehensive review of applicants."
Those who passed the written exam went on to the physical. It measured grip strength, "explosive" leg strength in squats, aerobic fitness and upper-body strength.
"One way to manage stress was to be physically fit," said Tina Rowe, the former U.S. marshal in Colorado who was a lieutenant at the academy. "We weren't thinking of muscles or buff for fighting crime as we were for their health. We had been graduating officers we knew would have fitness or weight issues later in their career."
All test results were averaged together, something that hasn't happened since. The top names on the hiring list included just one woman.
When Gavito entered the small, cramped academy building in Harvard Square Park in south Denver, nicknamed "the little red schoolhouse" by the instruction staff and torn down long ago, his first impression was the daunting size of his classmates.
"I've always been athletic, so I wasn't easily intimidated, but I remember sitting there and looking around thinking, 'Wow,"' said the 5-foot-10 former Englewood police officer. "Out of the 40, 35 of them looked like a recruitment poster of the commando squad or the SWAT team. I knew I had to be on my toes to compete."
One recruit, James "Jamie" Smith, had been the starting center for the 1984 Montana State University football team that captured the I-AA national championship. Another, Daniel O'Shea, had long been a champion powerlifter.
Kenneth Padgett was a competitive arm wrestler, and Bruce VanderJagt was a bodybuilder.
"Big, BIG guys," said classmate Benigno "Benny" Rucobo Jr., pointing to faces in a class picture, giving names and puffing his chest. Rucobo has been in a wheelchair since a 1992 off-duty motorcycle accident left his body paralyzed and his memories in a fractured mosaic.
There were brains in all the brawn, too. VanderJagt was completing a doctoral degree at the University of Denver, three others had master's degrees and more than half were college graduates, unusual even in today's academy classes, Civil Service Commission officials said.
To ensure the class remained physically fit, the city had the members agree to pass an annual agility exam or risk their badges.
"Officers need to be fit to avoid using excessive force or a weapon because they are not physically able to respond," former police chief Ari Zavaras testified in a 1990 police union lawsuit that successfully challenged the annual exam.
'Stupid' training regimen
Six weeks into their schooling, the class of '86 got a close-up view into how deadly their job could be. Officer Patrick Pollock, 30, was killed while trying to stop an armed robber on East Colfax Avenue on Dec. 12, 1986.
The class members donated blood. They placed black tape on their newly pinned-on badges.
"We were bright-eyed, ready to make a difference, thinking we were invincible," Gavito remembered of Pollock's death. "To see that I might not make it or survive was a cold, cold reality."
The shooting cemented the group's resolve to do well, several of them said.
"It made us realize how much we really needed each other," said Bohdan "Dan" Makolondra.
Study groups were held late at night, weightlifting sessions turned into friendly competitions - they even ran out of weights once - and pistol practice was a constant.
Five weeks after Pollock's death, the recruits of the class of '86-2 faced a unique training regimen that gave them a taste of real police work sooner than most.
Instead of the normal 22-week academy course, the new cops spent just 11 weeks at the cramped schoolhouse. After that, they spent 11 weeks on the street, learning the job from cops doubling as training officers.
The calls would be real. So would the bullets.
The idea was born of necessity. A spate of pending retirements meant the city needed police officers quickly. The academy building was too small to accommodate one large class, so administrators opted to overlap two classes.
As 1986-2 left the classroom for street training, a new group took its place. When "The Animals" finished their street training to return for an eight-week academy refresher, the other group began its street training.
Theoretically, it should have worked. It didn't. Some now say splitting the classroom time over two periods might have shortchanged the recruits.
"It was a total mess, just chaotic," said retired academy director Thomas Lahey. "With just one class of 30 you were pretty jammed. It was minor bedlam with 40. I think training suffered as a result."
One recruit, VanderJagt, accidentally shot himself in the abdomen and, Lahey said, was nearly dismissed over it.
Retired Sgt. Richard Castricone thinks the department was lucky.
"None of us thought it was a good idea to put them onto the street after only a few weeks," said Castricone, the academy's firing-range instructor. "With a badge and gun, that's dangerous. Was it a mistake? No, it was stupid."
When graduation day arrived on May 29, 1987, 37 of them had made it. Three had resigned, one for cheating.
Nine days after graduation they were wearing black tape on their badges again.
Officer James Wier, a 25-year-old recruit from the overlapping academy class, was felled by a shotgun blast to the face during the end of his field training. Wier and his training officer-partner, who was also shot but survived, were called to the home of a suicidal man who opened fire on them.
Wier's death ended concurrent academy classes and field training in the middle of classroom instruction at the old building. A new academy was opened in a former airplane hangar in 1994 and, because of its space, overlapping classes began anew in 2000, officials said, but classroom time hasn't been split with field training.
Despite Wier's death, "The Animals" were undaunted.
"Most of the individuals in this class were assertive and street smart and able to place themselves where they would do the most good rather than show up five minutes after someone called for the police," retired officer Michael Blake said.
(continued below)
Article Published: Sunday, September 21, 2003
'The Animals'
To fight skyrocketing crime, the Denver Police Department in1986 started a unique recruitment and training program - one that has not been used since - to help return order to the streets.
By David Migoya
Denver Post Staff Writer
It was 1986, and Denver was in trouble.
The crime rate was soaring. Homicides were occuring at a record pace.
The Police Department needed help.
"We were in bad economic times, the oil patch went south, the budget went to hell and we were having to make do with fewer cops," remembered J.D. MacFarlane, the city's manager of safety at the time. "The community wanted aggressive police officers."
What they got were "The Animals."
The 40 recruits who filled the Denver Police Academy that fall earned the nickname from veteran officers because of their collective size, strength and attitude.
And over the years, the group galvanized their reputation for toughness through heroism and sacrifice - but also by amassing an unmatched record of shootings and killings.
Fourteen officers from the class have been involved in the wounding or deaths of 14 people, 13 of them by gunfire, according to an analysis of police records by The Denver Post.
That number would be even higher had some of the officers not fired and missed, or chosen not to shoot because their line of fire was blocked, according to records and interviews.
The group with the next highest number of shooting incidents - eight - is a 1995 academy class. Tied for third highest, with six, is a 1982 class, some of whom either helped train members of 1986-2, as "The Animals" were officially called, or fired their weapons alongside them years later, records show.
"To have one particular class with an unusually high number of shootings can't just be an anomaly or aberration," said Ken Cooper, director of Tactical Handgun Training, a firearms training academy in Kingston, N.Y. "Maybe it's a combination of things. Were they oversensitized to the dangers of the streets, or saw so many get hurt on the job that suddenly everyone looked like a potential killer of cops to them?"
Theories vary on why one class could have so many more shootings than others, but Cooper and other experts said they are not aware of any study that correlates gunfire to academy classes.
"One possibility is that this is just an ill-fated class," said Hans Toch, a criminal justice professor at the State University of New York at Albany who has studied Denver police shootings and testified at several trials that resulted from them. "Or, they merely ran into a disproportionate number of incidents."
The Post looked at all police shootings since 1980 following the death of Paul Childs, a 15-year-old mentally handicapped youth who was killed in July by officer Jim Turney when Childs did not drop a knife.
Turney is a 1998 graduate of the academy and only the third of his class to draw his weapon and fire. It was his second fatal shooting in as many years, and officials haven't yet determined whether it was justified.
Members of the class of '86, their trainers and police brass were not aware of the group's record of gunfire until told by The Post. The department doesn't track police shootings that way.
"I don't have any explanation for it," said Chief Gerry Whitman, who helped train some of the officers from 1986-2. "We've never tracked class patterns before."
That's changing, though. An academy class from last year is part of a long-term study to monitor their experiences, Whitman said.
The department ultimately said that each of the shootings by the class of '86 was justified. And while insisting that the members of the class were far from trigger-happy, several people who were involved with the class - from administrators who tested and selected them to the officers themselves - offered possible explanations for the number of incidents, including:
It was the first - and only - group in nearly two decades to be chosen from a battery of entrance exams that included a graded physical agility test. Doing well likely meant a job.
It was the first of two classes to divide training between the classroom and the streets, part of what class trainers now say was an ill-conceived effort to get officers on the job quickly. The group received 11 weeks of field training, dubbed "street survival," after just 11 weeks at the academy.
The recruits became more aware than most of the dangers they faced. Five law enforcement officers were killed in Colorado during the group's first year - two of them Denver officers - the most to die during the training of any academy class in more than a half-century, The Post found.
Some in the class say the experiences and training galvanized them to be assertive but careful cops at a time when crack cocaine and street gangs were emerging in Denver. Others described it as a thrill ride.
"When we came on, it was a particularly violent time in Denver, very much the Wild West with shots fired all over the place," said Jeffrey Rawson, a class of '86 graduate and now a police officer in Clearwater, Fla. He left Denver 13 years ago without shooting anyone during his time here.
"It was exciting as hell. Violent, but we were out there to take care of that."
Said MacFarlane, the manager of safety who hired the recruits: "They were there to move the crud off the streets."
'Big, BIG guys'
As the newly minted Denver police recruit stepped from the cruiser, the woman who had called for the police peered upward at him.
He was tall, muscular, imposing - precisely what Denver wanted its new police officers to look like.
"Where did you find this one?" the astonished woman is said to have asked the recruit's training officer, who had driven the car.
The senior officer smiled.
"We made him," was the semi-serious reply.
At the time the class of '86 was being recruited, many Denver police officers were a little pudgier than commanders liked, and not as aggressive about crime as the community thought they needed to be, several former police administrators said.
"With the crime rate and everything going on, and the pressures to do something about it, the city actively went out ... and selected officers that fit the need of the times," said Lt. Vincent Gavito, a member of the academy class that began its training in November 1986. "They wanted people who could go out there and fit the profile of doing police work."
What they got were 39 men and one woman who were faster, more agile and smarter than many police recruits who preceded them. The class included bodybuilders, football players, karate experts, gymnasts, competitive firearms experts, and civilian and military police officers, according to records and interviews.
From their ranks have come some headline-grabbing names noted for their heroics or escapades: VanderJagt, Blake, Gavito, Murawski, O'Shea.
"Our nickname became 'The Animals' from the other cops," said Michael Lohr, who resigned from the group before graduation and took a job with the Denver Water Department. "There were some really big physical specimens. The way they scored the physical agility exam, the bigger guys figured in there."
For the first time in 20 years, the Civil Service Commission, the agency that tests police applicants, administered a physical agility exam. The idea was to find the most physically fit applicants.
"There were many, many people in the department at that time who were overweight, smoked or were on disability constantly," remembered Maria Valdes, former executive director of the commission. "We were interested in moving from a paper-and-pencil thing to a more comprehensive review of applicants."
Those who passed the written exam went on to the physical. It measured grip strength, "explosive" leg strength in squats, aerobic fitness and upper-body strength.
"One way to manage stress was to be physically fit," said Tina Rowe, the former U.S. marshal in Colorado who was a lieutenant at the academy. "We weren't thinking of muscles or buff for fighting crime as we were for their health. We had been graduating officers we knew would have fitness or weight issues later in their career."
All test results were averaged together, something that hasn't happened since. The top names on the hiring list included just one woman.
When Gavito entered the small, cramped academy building in Harvard Square Park in south Denver, nicknamed "the little red schoolhouse" by the instruction staff and torn down long ago, his first impression was the daunting size of his classmates.
"I've always been athletic, so I wasn't easily intimidated, but I remember sitting there and looking around thinking, 'Wow,"' said the 5-foot-10 former Englewood police officer. "Out of the 40, 35 of them looked like a recruitment poster of the commando squad or the SWAT team. I knew I had to be on my toes to compete."
One recruit, James "Jamie" Smith, had been the starting center for the 1984 Montana State University football team that captured the I-AA national championship. Another, Daniel O'Shea, had long been a champion powerlifter.
Kenneth Padgett was a competitive arm wrestler, and Bruce VanderJagt was a bodybuilder.
"Big, BIG guys," said classmate Benigno "Benny" Rucobo Jr., pointing to faces in a class picture, giving names and puffing his chest. Rucobo has been in a wheelchair since a 1992 off-duty motorcycle accident left his body paralyzed and his memories in a fractured mosaic.
There were brains in all the brawn, too. VanderJagt was completing a doctoral degree at the University of Denver, three others had master's degrees and more than half were college graduates, unusual even in today's academy classes, Civil Service Commission officials said.
To ensure the class remained physically fit, the city had the members agree to pass an annual agility exam or risk their badges.
"Officers need to be fit to avoid using excessive force or a weapon because they are not physically able to respond," former police chief Ari Zavaras testified in a 1990 police union lawsuit that successfully challenged the annual exam.
'Stupid' training regimen
Six weeks into their schooling, the class of '86 got a close-up view into how deadly their job could be. Officer Patrick Pollock, 30, was killed while trying to stop an armed robber on East Colfax Avenue on Dec. 12, 1986.
The class members donated blood. They placed black tape on their newly pinned-on badges.
"We were bright-eyed, ready to make a difference, thinking we were invincible," Gavito remembered of Pollock's death. "To see that I might not make it or survive was a cold, cold reality."
The shooting cemented the group's resolve to do well, several of them said.
"It made us realize how much we really needed each other," said Bohdan "Dan" Makolondra.
Study groups were held late at night, weightlifting sessions turned into friendly competitions - they even ran out of weights once - and pistol practice was a constant.
Five weeks after Pollock's death, the recruits of the class of '86-2 faced a unique training regimen that gave them a taste of real police work sooner than most.
Instead of the normal 22-week academy course, the new cops spent just 11 weeks at the cramped schoolhouse. After that, they spent 11 weeks on the street, learning the job from cops doubling as training officers.
The calls would be real. So would the bullets.
The idea was born of necessity. A spate of pending retirements meant the city needed police officers quickly. The academy building was too small to accommodate one large class, so administrators opted to overlap two classes.
As 1986-2 left the classroom for street training, a new group took its place. When "The Animals" finished their street training to return for an eight-week academy refresher, the other group began its street training.
Theoretically, it should have worked. It didn't. Some now say splitting the classroom time over two periods might have shortchanged the recruits.
"It was a total mess, just chaotic," said retired academy director Thomas Lahey. "With just one class of 30 you were pretty jammed. It was minor bedlam with 40. I think training suffered as a result."
One recruit, VanderJagt, accidentally shot himself in the abdomen and, Lahey said, was nearly dismissed over it.
Retired Sgt. Richard Castricone thinks the department was lucky.
"None of us thought it was a good idea to put them onto the street after only a few weeks," said Castricone, the academy's firing-range instructor. "With a badge and gun, that's dangerous. Was it a mistake? No, it was stupid."
When graduation day arrived on May 29, 1987, 37 of them had made it. Three had resigned, one for cheating.
Nine days after graduation they were wearing black tape on their badges again.
Officer James Wier, a 25-year-old recruit from the overlapping academy class, was felled by a shotgun blast to the face during the end of his field training. Wier and his training officer-partner, who was also shot but survived, were called to the home of a suicidal man who opened fire on them.
Wier's death ended concurrent academy classes and field training in the middle of classroom instruction at the old building. A new academy was opened in a former airplane hangar in 1994 and, because of its space, overlapping classes began anew in 2000, officials said, but classroom time hasn't been split with field training.
Despite Wier's death, "The Animals" were undaunted.
"Most of the individuals in this class were assertive and street smart and able to place themselves where they would do the most good rather than show up five minutes after someone called for the police," retired officer Michael Blake said.
(continued below)
