I guess I'm just a glass half-full type of fool, which is probably every reason I am not flat ripping the Denver Police Department.

It is a laborious task, reading Denver Independent Police Monitor Richard Rosenthal's annual report that was released Wednesday, but it does give a cop critic such as me a smidgen of hope.

That there is an Office of the Independent Monitor at all still amazes, even now, two years after Rosenthal was first hired into the job. Better yet, he actually appears to be doing it.

The headline out of the report was the horrific behavior of Officer Randall Krouse, who a year ago January Tasered in the neck a handcuffed drunk he had pulled out of a bar disturbance and transported to the station.

The incident featured everything I have railed about in this space for more than 10 years - unnecessary force, lying in reports - columns that are always followed by calls from cops and their wives who spit that I know nothing of what it's like out on the streets.

We will get to Randall Krouse. The one incident in the report that eluded just about everyone talking or writing about it was deep in Chapter Three.

It gave me chills. It gave me hope. It occurred March 5 a year ago. There was a call of a disturbance. Multiple officers responded and contacted the woman who had placed it. She was drunk.

The officers settled her down, found nothing and left.

Later, a security guard at the building noticed that a lone officer had returned, secreted his patrol car in the back of the building and went up to the woman's apartment.

Thinking this suspicious, the guard made his own call to police.

The two District 1 officers who responded spotted the patrol car. They called in a sergeant. All three were met at the woman's door by the lone officer, who Rosenthal said gave them an "illogical" explanation. They called in Internal Affairs.

It was determined the officer went back to the apartment "with the intent of pressuring the woman to engage in sexual conduct," the report said. Further investigation revealed numerous other suspicious incidents involving the officer and female citizens, it added.

The officer, charged criminally by the district attorney, resigned.

Minus the booze, that woman could have been my kid. Or yours.

And the only reason we know about this incident, and how the cops themselves forcefully responded to it, is the police monitor.

Hope.

On the other hand, it astounds how Randall Krouse not only remains a Denver police officer, but was not charged.

"Understando Taser?" the officer asked handcuffed Kenneth Rodriguez, before he grabbed his stun gun and shot the man in the neck. Videotape caught it all.He and the reserve officer with him then wrote a lie-filled report that led Rodriguez, a truck driver just wanting to get out of town, to plead guilty to a host of charges including assault.

Even more incredibly, the officer's supervisor, having busted Krouse after watching the videotape, recommended a nine-day suspension. Hang on - a disciplinary board later reduced that pittance to seven days.

After Rosenthal harangued, Chief Gerry Whitman increased the penalty to 10 days. Unsatisfied, Rosenthal went to Manager of Safety Al LaCabe, who said, no, 60 days.

They fired the reserve officer outright, and convinced the district attorney to vacate Rodriguez's guilty plea.

"That has to be grounds for criminal charges," says Mark Silverstein, an ACLU of Colorado spokesman and longtime police critic.

"At least credit the DA for dropping the guilty plea and the officer's superiors for moving on it right away. Still, it is only because it was on video that anyone wanted to believe it happened. If it hadn't been, trust me, those officers' version of what happened would have gone down as truth."

What does this report really say about Al LaCabe, though?

It is his persistent foot-dragging, sharply criticized by Richard Rosenthal in his report for failing to process and release reports on officer-involved shootings and other officer-discipline cases, that created the conditions that screamed out for a police monitor in the first place.

"I'm working on it," is basically what Al LaCabe has been saying for two years now. It is no longer good enough.

"How much is enough?" asks Mark Silverstein. "In the last two years he has released only two reports, and they were on the most notorious police shootings in a decade."

The city still creeps along in the dark, he said, a fact compounded by District Attorney Mitch Morrisey's decision to keep closed every officer-involved file until LaCabe releases a report, which is counter to a longstanding procedure allowed by former DA and now-Gov. Bill Ritter.

Mark Silverstein, as perhaps should be expected, does not share my optimism.

"It is good that we have someone watching the police," he says, "that Richard Rosenthal is pressing the manager of safety, who deserves the criticism leveled in the report.

"It still remains simple first steps. We still need more light."

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com

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