Car rally demands Aurora City Council fire racist police chief
Aurora, CO – On the evening of October 26, a caravan of a dozen cars, adorned with signs and hand-written slogans, slowly wound through the heart of Aurora. Demonstrators in the caravan honked, played music, and spoke to the community via loudspeaker to draw attention to the growing momentum around a community campaign to fire Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain. In addition to firing Chamberlain, protesters also demanded that Aurora City Council create a democratic, community-led process for selecting his replacement.
Chamberlain was appointed a little over two years ago by an unelected city manager with no community input whatsoever. Community groups like the Denver-Aurora Community Action Committee (DACAC) have been consistently pushing for his removal since January, when several new members were sworn in to the city council. Though many of those new councilors ran on explicit platforms of police reform, none have put forward a plan to fire Chamberlain or to create community control over any aspect of Aurora Police Department (APD).
“The community would have never chosen Todd Chamberlain if we had a say,” said Miles Thompson, chair of DACAC. DACAC is a chapter of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and architect of the “Time’s up, Todd” campaign that is now uniting residents and community organizations around the fight against Chamberlain and for community control of the police.
“Todd Chamberlain being gone won’t solve everything, though. We have to have community control in order to solve this,” Thompson stated.
Chamberlain’s career before arriving in Aurora was littered with documented racism and other misconduct, including allowing racist harassment against officers in his charge. Since landing the job at APD, Chamberlain has lied numerous times to cover up police murders and even set up an APD recruitment table at a Trump rally, despite the department being under a consent decree for racism. Just three weeks ago, he lied again about Kilyn Lewis in a town hall meeting where Lewis’ family was present.
Lewis was murdered by Aurora SWAT in 2024 after complying with officer commands to put his hands up. He was holding a cell phone but was not armed. Chamberlain, not then chief of police during the time of Lewis’ killing, repeated falsehoods about the case at the town hall in an attempt to justify Lewis’ killing, as well as to discredit his family and their ongoing fight for justice.
Chamberlain’s history of racism has many community organizations joining forces to push for his immediate removal. One organization, Aurora Unidos CSO, spoke at the car rally. “Rather than funding schools, housing and universal healthcare, our elected officials offered $182 million to APD just this year to terrorize us and our neighbors,” said Yoselin Corrales, a member of Aurora Unidos CSO. “In the immigrants’ rights struggle, we know all too well what it’s like when state-sanctioned violence runs rampant with no enforceable measures of accountability. That’s why we support DACAC’s demands.”
After driving from the rally’s starting point at the Aurora Mall, through central Aurora, and past the site where Rajon Belt-Stubblefield was murdered by APD last fall, the group arrived at the Aurora Municipal Center to confront the city council directly.
The chambers were packed with nearly 200 members of the public looking to address the council. Even people who came to speak about data center moratoriums or mismanagement of homeless shelters often used some of their public comment time to demand that the council listen to the growing community calls for Todd Chamberlain’s termination. Applause erupted across the entire crowd every time the demand was mentioned throughout the evening.
While many expressed hope that their words would move city council to act, some made it clear that they were under no illusion that it would happen that night.
“We’re not going to convince these people, it’s not going to happen,” stated DACAC member Nels Pine in his public comment. “What we need to do is build a big mass movement like we’ve seen in history – like we saw in the 1960s, like we saw against nuclear weapons in the ‘80s, like we saw a few summers ago with the students against this genocide in Palestine – we’re not going to let anybody stand in our way.”
An official resolution to fire Todd Chamberlain has been drafted by DACAC and sent to city council members and, for almost a month, it went ignored. After Monday night’s show of force, however, two council members have agreed to meet with the group to discuss the possibility of moving forward with the resolution.