Around noon on a cold, foggy day in October of 2020, Steven Crist, an inmate at the El Paso County Detention Center, scaled a barbed wire fence and made a run for it. Police found him less than an hour later in an industrial park near the jail. He was treated for injuries and returned to the jail.

The escape was flashed across the evening’s TV news reports and made headlines in the next day’s newspaper, but what didn’t come to light for months afterward was the fact that Todd Hauck, then a deputy at the jail, skipped the required inmate check that day, where every prisoner is regularly accounted for, and instead simply marked the form indicating he had done it. Apparently, he’d been taking the same shortcut for months.

Once discovered, Hauck told internal investigators that he and other jail officers considered his assignment “vacation,” and confessed to watching YouTube videos on his phone, rather than carrying out his duties. He chalked it up to “being lazy” and “just burnt out.”

Hauck’s falsified prisoner checks qualified as an “untruthful statement,” triggering the state police certification board’s revocation of his certification, meaning he can no longer work as a police officer anywhere in the state.

The new requirement to revoke police officer certifications for officers found to have made untrue statements in the course of their work comes from a new state law passed in 2019 and first put into effect at the end of 2020.

Specifically, the law applies when an officer “knowingly made an untruthful statement concerning a material fact or omitted a material fact on an official criminal justice record, while testifying under oath, or during an internal affairs investigation or comparable administrative investigation.”

The law also requires agencies to have an administrative process, including a way for officers to appeal, and that the facts of the incident must qualify using a “clear and convincing” evidence standard, meaning “highly and substantially more likely to be true than untrue.”

Prior to the new law, even if Hauck or another officer was found to have lied about their work, they might be fired, but could retain their certification and still be hired at another Colorado law enforcement agency.

The new law aims to rid the state of dishonest police who might use their criminal enforcement power under false pretense, but it also serves the police departments because the testimony of officers who have a history of dishonesty can be called into question, jeopardizing criminal convictions.

After a year of the new law’s implementation, 25 Colorado police officers have had their peace officer certification stripped because of untruthful statements, accounting for about half of all decertifications since the new law has been used.

“Whenever you run this type of legislation, it helps that it creates the outcome you desire,” said Colorado State Sen. Rhonda Fields, one of the new law’s co-sponsors.

She said the goal of the law was simple: “It was to prevent and avoid the misinterpretation of facts when it comes to police, and what they report.”

The law also requires the state’s Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST) Board to post information about decertified police officers online.

So far, the Pueblo Police Department has had the most decertifications due to untruthfulness, with three officers losing their ability to work as an police officer.

Two brothers who worked at Pueblo PD were both decertified in 2021 for untruthfulness. One was found to have kicked a man during an arrest and failed to report his use of force that came to light only after a formal complaint was later filed and investigated. The other was found to have knowingly shortchanged the department’s vacation bookkeeping system.

The third Pueblo police officer to be decertified was found to have lied about a sequestration violation, which relates to impermissible communication about a crime with a witness to the crime, prior to the crime being adjudicated.

Pueblo Deputy Chief James Martin said having the most decertifications in the state shouldn’t be seen as a negative, but rather a sign that his department is diligent about rooting out officers who shouldn’t be there.

“We’re proud that we hold our officers accountable for their actions,” he said. “We feel like that’s key to keeping the trust of the public.”

Colorado Springs Police Department had no decertifications during the first year of the new law. Both Denver and Aurora, with two of the largest police agencies in the state, haven’t had any officers decertified under the new law, partly because of how their internal investigations practices already worked.

The law calls for using a “clear and convincing” standard to determine when an officer should be decertified for untruthfulness, but the Denver and Aurora police departments had been using a lower standard in their internal investigations. They were using the “preponderance of evidence” standard before the new law’s passage, meaning officers would be terminated for untruthfulness with less evidence, but the agencies’ standards did not match what the new law required.

Denver police, in the past few weeks, began using the “clear and convincing” standard for their internal investigations into untruthful statements. A spokesperson for the department said that since August 2019, six officers were investigated for untruthfulness. Five were recommended for termination and either resigned or retired.

“If the standard of evidence in these five cases had been ‘clear and convincing,’ these five officers would have been reported to POST for decertification,” Denver Police Department spokesperson Douglas Schepman wrote in an email.

The sixth resigned before the investigation finished.

The agency’s investigations will now use the standard that matches the new law’s requirements.

In Aurora, the department still uses the lower “preponderance of evidence” standard for their internal affairs investigations, but to comply with the new law requiring decertification, each case is being additionally reviewed.

“APD’s current policy is that after all appeals rights have been exhausted, the chief will review the (internal affairs finding) and determine whether the conduct meets the elevated legal standard for POST reporting of ‘clear and convincing,’” Aurora Police Department spokesperson Matthew Longshore wrote in an email.

The department found 13 officers to be untruthful under the lower standard, and referred one to POST for decertification.

According to records provided by the Colorado POST Board, 14 of the 25 officers decertified for untruthfulness had worked at only one police department in the state. But 11 had worked at multiple police departments around the state, with one working at five different agencies, two officers who had worked at four different agencies and two had worked at three different departments.

Sen. Fields echoed Pueblo’s Martin in saying the numerous decertifications are a sign of positive change. She said she hopes the state’s police departments are letting their rank and file know that lying in the course of their work can come with severe repercussions.

“It needs to be exposed,” she said. “And the police departments need to be briefing their officers on this. They need to know how to follow the rules and what the consequences are.”

The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office and the Lone Tree Police Department each had two officers decertified for untruthfulness, and several other departments had just one.

The second El Paso County Sheriff’s deputy decertified for untruthfulness, Russell Smith, also skipped inmate checks at the jail and falsified reports saying he had completed them.

In Smith’s case, which happened about one year before the jail escape incident under Todd Hauck’s watch, Smith should have observed, during normal inmate checks, that an inmate had been punched in the face and had two black eyes. It wasn’t until the next day, when another jail officer properly completed the inmate checks and found the beaten inmate.

“It can be cumbersome,” Smith said of the inmate checks during his internal affairs investigation. He went on to say that he was “not taking it seriously,” and that he was “obviously being lazy.”

Fields said the new law requiring decertification for untruthful officers is only one police reform, among many she wants to see passed. This year, she said she has been focused on reforming the practice of no-knock raids and forcible entries for executing warrants.