DENVER — The city of Aurora announced Tuesday that it has appointed Art Acevedo as the police department’s interim chief.
Acevedo, who has served as police chief in Austin, Texas, Houston and most recently Miami, was appointed as city officials “resets the national recruitment process for a permanent chief,” a release from the city read.
Acevedo will step into the role in early December, replacing current Interim Police Chief Daniel J. Oates, who will return to his home and family in Florida, the city said.
Earlier this year, Acevedo filed a lawsuit against the city of Miami claiming he was wrongfully fired as Miami’s police chief in 2021 after just a few months on the job. Acevedo is claiming they fired him for blowing the whistle on wrongdoing by city officials, as CNN reported.
MORE | Aurora looking to hire Art Acevedo as interim police chief
He was hired in Miami amid high praise from the city's mayor – who called Acevedo the “Tom Brady or the Michael Jordan of police chiefs" – after more than four years as the Houston (Texas) Police Department chief.
"Aurora reminds me of Houston. Both cities are incomparably diverse and culturally rich,” Acevedo said in a news release. “As a bilingual Cuban American born in Cuba and raised in the U.S., I am intimately familiar with the challenges facing diverse communities like Aurora, and I applaud the city’s simultaneous efforts to tackle crime and implement public safety changes to better reflect the people it serves. I look forward to building upon Chief Oates’s work to ensure the department implements the consent decree, strengthens public trust, and enhances the safety of this culturally rich city.”
Acevedo most recently worked as a CNN law enforcement analyst and an adviser with the body camera analytics company Truleo.
Oates has been the interim chief of the department since this summer. He was picked as the interim chief after former chief Vanessa Wilson was fired in April for what the city manager called her failure to effectively manage the department.
City Manager Jim Twombly said in October that community members and City Council members wanted the city to continue the search and start over for “a variety of reasons,” which he said he supported.
“We all – city management, the City Council, and the community – want the best person for the job who will address crime in Aurora and lead the Aurora Police Department to be racially equitable, bias-free, culturally competent and responsive to all residents,” Aurora City Manager Jim Twombly said at the time.
“I welcome Chief Acevedo’s depth of experience and track record of championing national best practices in policing,” Twombly said in Tuesday's release. “We will harness his expertise as we reevaluate our national police chief search well into 2023."
Denver7 spoke to two community members who worked with the city's Community Police Task Force, which has since been disbanded. Both Lindsay Minter, a task force member, and Joshua Jackson, a representative with the state's NAACP chapter, said the community is open to Acevedo's leadership but wants to hear from him directly.
"We've said from the beginning that this does not have to be an adversarial process," Jackson said of the search for a new chief. "And we can move forward in this process, responsibly and respectfully, from the community side, as well as for the department."
Minter said she will be watching closely, with the future of Aurora at stake.
"We have police-involved shootings, we have youth violence, we have robberies," she said. "And when people are afraid of crime, and people are afraid of coming to the city, that hurts us. That stops us from growing."
During a press briefing Tuesday evening, Acevedo said APD has more work to do when it comes to the consent decree the department entered into last year after a report from Attorney General Phil Weiser alleging excessive force and racially biased police practices. But Acevedo stressed the department isn’t broken.
“I see this consent decree as an opportunity to help provide our officers with the processes, the systems, equipment, the training, everything they need,” Acevedo said. “Let me just be real clear to everybody, this is not a broken department. This is a department, like every other department, [that is] a work in progress. We always have to do better out there.”
When asked if he was interested in a permanent position, he said, "We'll see."