Boulder police are pulling their guns at more than two times the rate they were four years ago — 240 times in 2024 compared with 93 times in 2021, a new use of force dashboard released by the department revealed.
The data comes six years after Boulder police pulled their guns on Zayd Atkinson, a Black Naropa student who was picking up trash outside his apartment. Boulder settled with Atkinson, and introduced a series of reforms, including a revision to its use of force policy at the end of 2020 that included a de-escalation training program.
That program, called ICAT, was found to reduce use of force incidents in Louisville, Kentucky, by about 28%.
But after a dip in use of force incidents in 2021, these occurrences have only gone up in Boulder. Each of the last three years (2022, 2023, 2024) had higher use of force incidents than in 2021, though 2024 had lower numbers than the previous two years.
Both 2022 and 2023 saw about 11% more use of force incidents than pre-ICAT 2020, though force was used 7% less in 2024 than 2020.
“The question I think the data answer is: Are those reforms working?” said civil rights attorney Dan Williams. Williams previously represented a Black man arrested by an officer with repeated allegations of excessive force. That lawsuit led to the release of past use of force data.
“I think the answer to that question is just an unqualified ‘No, they’re not working.’” Williams said. “That means, if the city is serious about police reform, which it consistently says it is, it really needs to look and try again, because we are moving in the wrong direction.”
‘A traumatic experience’
Pulling a gun is just one example of a “use of force” in Boulder, defined as “any physical strike, physical contact with an object or tool, or any significant physical contact that restricts movement of a person,” according to the dashboard. It includes using a gun, less-lethal projectiles like foam projectiles, using or displaying a taser, takedowns and pepper spray.
Boulder police drew firearms about 100 times more in 2024 than they did pre-ICAT training in 2020. About 73% of force used was a “display for compliance,” according to the dashboard.
“We want police to be able to use whatever tools they need to to keep themselves in the community safe if they or someone else is in danger,” said Matt Graham, a senior data analyst with the Center for Policing Equity (CPE). “We want them to be able to draw their firearms. But a lot of police department policies say that you shouldn’t draw a firearm unless there’s imminent danger such that you think you may have to use the firearm. And on this dashboard, I see them making reference to displaying firearms to gain compliance. That, to me, could indicate that they are pointing firearms at people as sort of an intimidation tactic.”
Graham said that’s “problematic.”
“When anyone else in the community points a firearm at someone, it’s considered such a grave danger that it justifies lethal force from police,” he said. “And so for them to point firearms at people themselves, that is not a minor instance. That’s not innocuous. We’ve had all these police killings over the last two years that have received national attention. These days, especially if you’re Black, having a firearm ppointed at you by a police officer is terrifying.
“That may not inflict physical harm, but it certainly inflicts psychological harm,” he continued. “That is a traumatic experience.”
A 2022 snapshot on policing in Boulder said that “instead of firearm display to gain compliance, officers are more likely to display tasers when dangerous circumstances require immediate deescalation” since implementing ICAT.
That’s no longer the case. In 2024, police displayed tasers less than half the number of times they displayed guns. They used their tasers about the same number of times each year — 18 in 2024 and 19 in 2021.
On average, there were about 22 use of force incidents per month in 2024, and police logged 22 uses of force in January 2025.
A use of force incident “is a distinct event that involved one or more force applications.” That means multiple types of force can be used within the same incident, and multiple officers can be involved in one incident. For example, there were 266 use of force incidents in 2024 but 482 applications, according to the dashboard, which will be updated monthly.
“We should commend the department just for putting this out there,” Graham said. “Transparency is the first step toward accountability, and so just putting this out there can only make things better. So really heartening to see them putting this out there for the community.”
The police department did not make Police Chief Stephen Redfearn or anyone else from the department available for an interview for this story, despite repeated requests from Boulder Weekly.
On a statement posted to X, the department touted use of force incidents as “rare,” which it said was evidenced in the fact that “more than 99.5% of dispatch-recorded interactions do not involve a use of force” and “more than 9 out of 10 arrests do not involve police use of force.”
“We want our community to have a clear picture of what we do and how we do it, and using data is key to this,” Redfearn said in the statement posted to X on March 5.
The data is ‘striking’
Force is disproportionately used on Black people, according to the Center for Policing Equity, and the data suggests that holds true in Boulder. In 2024, 10% of use of force applications were against Black people and 23% were against Hispanic or Latino people.
Boulder’s population is just 1.1% Black and 11.2% Hispanic or Latinx, according to census data. Boulder is about 80% white.
Williams called those numbers “striking.”
“In a city that’s overwhelmingly white, 33% of use of force by Boulder Police Department is against black and brown people, and that is just unacceptable,” he said.
The police department cautioned against drawing such conclusions in the post on X.
“Just because a person was contacted by a Boulder Police officer does not mean they are a Boulder resident, therefore a demographic comparison to this dashboard data is not necessarily accurate,” the post read.
“The population comparison is not perfect by any means,” CPE’s Graham said. “We’ve got people who are coming into town from elsewhere or just driving through town to get somewhere else. So the population does not capture the demographics of everyone that officers could or do interact with. But it is sort of a useful baseline, and at least based on that, it does look like there are some racial disparities in force.”
Being able to see data on police stops and searches by race, stop reasons and how that compares to force rate would provide further context, he said. Another new dashboard with contact data shows that 5.7% of people who had interactions with police were Black and 16% were Hispanic. Those contacts are in-person interactions “for the purpose of enforcing the law or investigating possible violations of the law,” including in or out of a car and whether or not the contact was consensual.
According to a 2020 study from Harvard’s school of public health, Black people are three times more likely than white people to be killed by police, though outcomes varied significantly from city to city.
Boulder police never fired a gun in 2024, according to the dashboard. The more granular data isn’t available for 2022 and 2023 — only the blanket number of use of force incidents — but police shot and killed two people in 2023.
The number of incidents police are responding to, as well as number of arrests, has risen steadily every year since 2021, save for a dip in arrests in 2022, according to the dashboard. Meanwhile, violent crime in Boulder has gone down each year since 2021, according to Colorado Bureau of Investigation data. Robbery, burglary and vehicle theft are also down since 2021.
Out of 311 people who were subjected to force in 2024, 90 were not arrested.
“That’s 30% of the people that officers used force against who were not arrested,” Graham said. “When we look at the types of force used, that’s overwhelmingly pointing firearms at people. So you’re pointing firearms at people who you don’t then have cause to arrest — that is concerning… There are scenarios when police use force and then don’t arrest people. It happens.
“30% of the time is among the highest rates I have seen,” he said. “That is very high for use of force without an arrest.”
Most often, police used force when there was a call for service (186 times). The dashboard does not include more specific data on what led to the use of force — a potentially illuminating omission, according to the Center for Policing Equity (CPE).
“For instance, arresting someone simply for jaywalking would not seem to warrant the use of a Taser,” a 2016 report from CPE stated. “The situation is far different if the jaywalking individual produces a weapon and makes threats. Sadly, these data are not often captured in use of force forms.”
CPE’s report showed that cities with 100,000 to 500,000 residents averaged 293 force incidents yearly; cities with populations under 100,000 had 88. Boulder’s population is about 106,000, according to census data.
However, drawing comparisons to national data on use of force is difficult, as “law enforcement agencies track ‘force’ in many different ways,” according to the Center for Policing Equity. “In fact, there’s no national standard requiring departments to track when force was used.”
Boulder, for example, counts any display of a taser or gun as a use of force.
“Other police departments do not consider that a use of force,” the dashboard states. “As a result, direct comparisons between agencies will be inaccurate.”
The 2021 report from BPD showed a decrease in use of force complaints after ICAT training — 14 in 2020 compared to eight in 2021. The new dashboard does not include data about use of force complaints.
The Police Oversight Panel will hear a presentation from Daniel Reinhard, chief data analyst for the city, on the new dashboards at its April 7 meeting.