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Kurt Wallace: This is Kurt Wallace and our guest today on Rare is Chris Halsne, national award winning investigative reporter with KDVR FOX 31 in Denver Colorado, and Chris thanks for being with us today.

Chris Halsne: Thank you so much for having us this is an important topic.

Kurt Wallace: It’s a very important topic. You’ve uncovered an amazing story. There are multiple stories here. A lot things to cover.  To start off with — to set the stage, David Flores was beaten by a police officer Charles Jones IV and what happens following.

Chris Halsne: What happened, the center of this complaint really is that a bystander, a witness, a guy by the name of Levi Frasier was watching an arrest go down in front of him in a public parking lot in Denver.

He pulled out his Samsung tablet, was brand new to him, and he hit record. And, he recorded about :55 seconds of a narcotics team and a pair of uniformed officers from the Denver police department making an arrests on two Honduran immigrants.

David Flores in the video can be seen on the concrete parking lot with some officers piled on top of him and this officer is punching him in the face trying to get him open his mouth. And when the man on the ground is being punch, you can hear off screams with this tablet in Spanish a woman screaming at the top of her lungs for the police to stop. It turned out to be the man, Mr. Flores’ girlfriend.

She came running up to the scrum and they did a leg sweep on her. So, the same officer who was doing the punching knocked her down.  And, I think what shocked our viewers when they saw it is she was seven and a half months pregnant and she landed very hard on her face and her protruding stomach.

So, the witness himself who recorded this — his complaint was when he stepped forward as a witness telling police and internal affairs that he believed that they’d gone too far. They were awfully rough on the two suspects. And, then they treated him more like a suspect than an innocent witness, After he came forward with that complaint he says the police intimidated, threatened him and tried to seize his tablet, over his objections.

Kurt Wallace: Well, things got really weird after that. My understanding is the officer in question (the one that was doing the beating and pounding this man head and his head pounding against the concrete — he had to go to the hospital) officer Jones gets promoted?

Chris Halsne: That is true. The incident happened in August. The Denver police department tells us that they did their internal affairs investigation whenever there’s excessive force certainly when there’s injuries like there was to Mr. Flores, somebody has to file that paperwork.

There was an internal investigation and they cleared the officers of any wrongdoing and said that they used reasonable force.  About November Mr. Frasier came forward to me with his video tape. The police wrote those reports and made those internal investigations they way they were without seeing the video.

They didn’t know the video tape existed at the time. And so, they reopened an investigation just about three weeks ago after seeing the video and hearing these new witness accounts. The police reports don’t exactly match up with what’s on video.

And, in the meantime somewhere in there Officer Charles Chris Jones, the man seen punching Mr. Flores and tripping his pregnant girlfriend had apparently done very well on his Sergeants exam and had moved up the list to get a promotion. Instead of putting the breaks on that promotion when the new internal affairs investigation began. About a week after we aired this piece of video Denver police went forward and promoted him to Sargent.

Kurt Wallace: Levi Frasier, he video taped this. That comes forward. You do a report on this. Then they reopen the investigation.  This man get promoted. And then Levi Frasier gets arrested?

Chris Halsne: Last week, Levi Frasier was to come to our studios here at FOX 31 Denver about 11 am and do an interview with us to what I call do a play by play. A new interview on the HALO video. On this secondary piece of video that we had acquired. Which showed this arrest scene in a much longer form than in just his :55 seconds from his tablet.

About 10 am he was visiting at the FBI locally here to pick up his tablet. They had taken possession of it several weeks before to do some analysis on it as part of his complaint filed with the FBI public corruption unit. And, between the FBI office and several blocks from this station, Mr. Frasier was pulled over by an unmarked Denver police officer and arrested.

The charge was a failure to appear warrant out of an adjoining county for not having proof of insurance. We’ve asked questions about how often someone goes to jail, not just arrested, but jail for 24 hours on a failure to appear on a traffic infraction. So, far we haven’t seen that data but we are going to be reporting on it when we do.

Kurt Wallace: This sounds like an intimidation tactic by the police department there. What is the Denver police department saying about all these things that are occurring? Coincidences and the video tapes of the beatings, the information not being in the report, what are they saying?

Chris Halsne: I guess I’d categorize it in two general areas. First of all they can’t give us very many new details because there’s an ongoing investigation and I understand that. But they’ve handled the questions from myself, the station and other media elements in this way. It’s attack the messenger.

They have come out very strongly in criticizing and questioning the credibility of the witness who video taped this Levi Frasier.  They released a criminal record of his from another state. They have told me quote “he’s a liar”. They have basically told us he’s an unrealizable guy.

Secondarily, anytime we do a news report quoting him in anyway, they believe the media outlet like ourselves are being unfair as well by putting somebody who doesn’t have any credibility according to them on TV. The problem with that is not only is the video very clear about what’s happening but the police reports we see give us a ton of facts we can rely on.

And, every extra piece of video tape or witness that we talk to only seems to corroborate the credibility of witness Levi Frasier. We looked for holes in his story.  We’re good investigative reporters and we have a good team here. But, just about everything he said from day one, there’s some kind of proof out there that is true.

Kurt Wallace: Talk about the HALO video. What is a HALO camera and what kind of evidence corroborate Levi Frasier on that video?

Chris Halsne: Well, it’s interesting is the :55 seconds that he’s rolling is mostly the punching and the tripping. And then Levi Frasier turned off his tablet realizing that an officer had seen him and yelled the word ‘Camera” to his friends and other colleagues.

So, Levi stopped recording and he took that tablet to his van and hid it under some tools in the parking lot and then came back to that scene to give his witness statement. The HALO video actually starts recording just after Levi Frasier stopped recording on the ground.

And, this HALO camera’s pretty wide. There’s some ability for them to push in and move around. The scene is just totally chaotic.  But before anybody knew that video existed, we had Levi Frasier the witness story. And, he told us a story that he didn’t have any real proof of on tape.

And, when we rolled the HALO video everything he told us from before — what he did, where he moved, how the officers acted all seemed to play out in front of us on this HALO camera.

And, a HALO camera is actually kind of an Eagle eye camera mounted at the top of a tall pole in high crime areas. And, the city has operation of this from a remote location. Sometimes they’re recording all the time in a very wide way. Other times they can push the camera in.  In this circumstance they pushed in a little bit on the action.

Kurt Wallace: How often does police abuse occur where there’s no proof? This is a question that I’m starting to wonder about after seeing all of these incidents across the nation. There’s a lot of uproar about the way police behave toward individuals two of them national stories were killed.

In this case it was a beating. There are many cases that I’ve covered where we’ve seen police abuse and police cover up. This is probably the most transparent of police cover ups that I’ve seen so far.

Chris Halsne: I can only talk about Denver and we’ve pulled the records. In the last five years there have been about 1300 excessive force complaints filed against the department to the internal affairs division. There are more than that who don’t file complaints. Especially, those in our immigrant community and we can come back to that.

But, of those 1300 complaints of excessive force, 11 of them resulted in some kind of disciplinary action. And, four of those there were video tape involved.  So, when there’s video tape involved there’s something for investigators to look at. And, when there’s not often it’s difficult to corroborate the witnesses statements when you start weighing that against maybe three or four police officers and their reports.

Kurt Wallace: Where does this story go next? What do you see happening? How does it play out at this point?

Chris Halsne: Well, I guess where it’s going now is that there are significant sections of the Denver community who have seen this coverage, are calling the police department under the carpet in their communities so to speak for how they’ve handled this affair.

For example, the Colorado Latino forum has come out with a report asking the Denver police department to stop attacking witnesses who stepped forward with something that they saw was wrong with the police force. There’s also been mayors, appointed council called the Citizens Oversight Board who have sent a letter to the Chief condemning them for both backing the officers in this case and attacking the witness and the media. Instead of rooting out the cause of the problem.

So, I think the simple answer is now maybe it becomes political. There are the mayor, the police chief, some very high ranking powerful leaders in this town, they want answers about how the department is operating. And, this case now has become an example of the thorn of the side. An example of how the police behavior can be out of control.

And, everybody’s talking now about policies and procedures and ways to improve those relations. And, improve the way the police department relates to people on the street.

Kurt Wallace: In terms of the people on the street relating to police officers, where are their rights? And are they in their right to video tape an officer at any time?

Chris Halsne: Yes, absolutely. In today’s electronic age, you can use your cellphone, your tablet, your video camera, your still camera. You can take all the pictures you want of police activity in a public area. They cannot stop you.

They also cannot, according to a new supreme court case from July called the Riley Case — police cannot seize that electronic device from you and scroll through it. They cannot go into your photo gallery, they cannot have the video, they cannot have the pictures unless they get a court ordered warrant from the judge. It is not only police department policy, it is the law.

Justice Roberts said that people’s electronic devices now are like they’re carrying around a large filing cabinet of person information, their social security numbers, their email addresses of their friends, their bank account numbers, their passwords are all stored in those electronic devices. Police may not go through that material without a search warrant.

Kurt Wallace: Chris Halsne national award winning investigative reporter with KDVR FOX 31 in Denver Colorado, thanks for being with us today on Rare.

Chris Halsne: Thank you so much, I appreciate it.

Denver Police accused of excessive force illegal search