A week after an Aurora police officer shot and killed Jor’Dell Richardson, a crowd of 200 or so protestors swelled in front of the Aurora Municipal Center. It was June 9, and chants of “Justice for Jor’Dell!” pierced the early evening air. One protestor held an upside-down American flag bearing the names of more than 100 victims of police violence from across the country jotted along the length of Old Glory’s stripes; another clutched a bundle of white sage—its smoke, in some spiritual traditions, is used as a tool to heal and purify. SWAT team officers monitored the gathering from the facility’s roof as calls for the resignation of Art Acevedo—Aurora’s interim police chief and fifth boss in four years—periodically emanated from the crowd.
Richardson, a 14-year-old Black teenager, died after an Aurora officer shot him on June 1 in an alley behind a strip mall on East Eighth Avenue and Dayton Street. Richardson and four others had robbed a convenience store, and police said Richardson threatened the store clerk with what appeared to be a semi-automatic pistol. The teens fled when the cops arrived, and Richardson refused to comply with officers’ demands when they pursued him.
On the front steps of the municipal complex, behind a lectern adorned with photos of Richardson, Siddhartha Rathod, a lawyer representing the family, addressed the protestors. “Our Black and brown children have to have the ability to make mistakes and have the same opportunities to surrender and not be shot but to breathe,” he said. Richardson’s family acknowledged that Jor’Dell had made a mistake, but one for which the adventurous teen with an infectious laugh didn’t deserve to die. He’d just finished eighth grade at Aurora West College Preparatory Academy, where he was a star basketball player. Not long after Rathod’s remarks, a pastor beseeched the Lord for justice and change, and Richardson’s 19-year-old brother, Anton, crumpled into his father’s arms and wept.
The community had been through this before, most notably in August 2019, when Elijah McClain, a Black, 23-year-old massage therapist, died after having been restrained by Aurora first responders. Less than a year later, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, McClain’s killing—as well as the shooting death of Breonna Taylor by police in Louisville, Kentucky—became the impetus for a national referendum on police reform.
To the protestors gathered on that June day, Richardson’s death was just the latest example of the racist and violent tactics of a police department plagued by such abuses for years and proof that nothing had changed. “He was murdered,” said Jason McBride, a gang prevention specialist in Aurora, as he surveyed the crowd chanting Richardson’s name. “It’s the same thing by the same police force. It’s something that our community has had to deal with far too often. And at some point, you know, we’re going to erupt.”
ABOUT TWO HOURS EARLIER, Acevedo, 59, had held a press conference on the second floor of the Aurora Police Department Headquarters. Acevedo was sworn in on December 5, 2022, as interim chief and charged with keeping the peace in Colorado’s third most populous—and most diverse—city, which hems in Denver to the east and spans 161 square miles across three counties and vast political chasms.
In an attempt to clarify the circumstances of Richardson’s death, Acevedo played—and made public for the first time—the footage from the body cameras worn by the two responding officers that day. “What I’m going to do this afternoon, in the spirit of transparency, I’m going to provide the community an overview of where we’ve been, where we’re at, then we’ll release body-worn camera videos of the two primary officers engaged in foot pursuit
