The Biggest Gang of All

By: Conner Drigotas

Fear

Inside her blue SUV with Colorado plates, Brittney Gilliam sat with her six-year-old daughter, 17-year-old sister, and two nieces, ages 12 and 14. It was supposed to be a girl's day. A fun Auntie, building a relationship with the next generation. She was on her phone looking for an open nail salon as the one in the lot they were parked in was unexpectedly closed. The plan was to get ice cream later.

Brittany Gilliam’s car had been idling for ten minutes before the police showed up. 

As the granddaughter of a police officer and then employee of the Colorado Department of Corrections, Brittany was not overly concerned to see an Aurora Police Department (APD) cruiser pull up behind her. Mere seconds later, however, two officers emerged from the vehicle with guns drawn. Officers Darien Dasko and Madisen Moen trained sights on the SUV, yelled directions, and within minutes had Brittany and the children laid out on the hot ground with their arms outstretched, being accused of driving a stolen vehicle.

Two additional cruisers soon arrived on the scene and began handcuffing each family member as Brittany’s daughter screamed in fear. The handcuffs were too large for the six-year-old and the under-age girls were each patted down by the male officers as the female cops stood by, watching.

Brittany was handcuffed and put in the back of a police cruiser, forced to leave the four children behind. “They just kept saying that my vehicle was stolen,” she says, “Who reported it stolen, me? Myself? I just wanted it to make common sense.”

“I couldn't see the kids directly.” Brittany says, “I could see my niece's foot sticking out as she was handcuffed on the hot ground. I heard the kids crying. It just broke me.” 

This is a key part of the legal action they later took against the Department which reads, in part: “Ms. Gilliam repeatedly asked to show [the] Officer Defendants her registration which would have immediately revealed that her vehicle was not stolen, yet none of the officers permitted her to undertake this simple action.”

As the situation unfolded, bystanders began to congregate and film. As many as fourteen officers were on the scene - and common sense was in short supply. There was no proof of wrongdoing, and it was obvious to everyone not wearing a badge that something didn't add up. The legal complaint says that police “ignored the minor Plaintiffs’ repeated calls for their mothers, fathers, and aunts. The bystanders looked on in horror as the girls screamed and cried; they stood powerless to stop what was happening… bystanders pleaded for the officers to put away their weapons,”

To this point in the arrest, Brittany was cooperative. “The only reason I could calm down is because those four kids are depending on me in that moment,” she says.

Finally, sitting handcuffed in the back of the police cruiser, she heard Dispatch confirm the truth: Aurora police Dasko and Moen have the wrong car, the wrong driver, and the wrong passengers. The officers have been wrong at every step.

The moment of relief she experienced, however, was short-lived.

Brittany says Officer Dasko turned to her and apologized. She told him she does not want an apology, just to “get out of these handcuffs” so she can get back to the four still panicking children.

Officer Dasko then drops the other shoe - he tells her he will continue to keep her in handcuffs and separated from the children, despite knowing she is completely innocent of any wrongdoing, “until a Sergent gets here.”

Brittany’s fear becomes anger. Unjustly in chains at the hands of an officer who knows he is in the wrong, the real fight begins.

Anger

It is around this time, Brittany says, that the cops start looking for a way out. They scurry back and forth, working to quell the gathering crowd who continue to film and berate the officers for handcuffing small children. In the onlooker video of the incident, you can hear crying and screaming.

For all their busy movement, what the officers don’t do is immediately release Brittany and the children from their unjust incarceration. Despite Dispatch confirming they are entirely innocent, the wrongs perpetrated against them continue.

“They wanted to call their Sergeant, their Supervisor, everyone in command, to come handle the situation except themselves,” Brittany remembers. “I just wanted them to take accountability for what they did.”

Though Brittany was eventually unhandcuffed, it would be two hours before Aurora Police Department Sergents would arrive and the responsibility would be transferred from the errant officers to the next level up in the chain of command. According to the complaint, “Despite their obvious innocence and the lack of probable cause or even reasonable suspicion to believe that they had committed any crime, it would be hours before Officer Defendants finally released the family.”

This kind of mistreatment, Brittany says, is distressingly typical of Aurora police. The complaint they filed to seek accountability details a uniquely high rate of police violence and racially motivated policing. They cite research showing that from “January 2013 through December 2019, APD ranked 8th out of the 100 largest cities in the United States for most police killings per capita. During that same period, APD killed Black people at 4 times the rate it killed white people.” In points 76 through 105 of her lawsuit, Brittany’s legal team offers a summary of at least 25 separate instances in which Aurora Police Officers used force against minorities.

“They didn't view us as human,” Brittany recounts, “They wanted to keep pointing their guns at us, they wanted to lay someone out.”

Accountability

In January of 2021, the aforementioned complaint was filed against the officers involved, then-Police Chief Vanessa Wilson, and the City of Aurora Colorado. From the beginning, Brittany says it was another reminder of how bad actors can hide behind a badge. She says early in the process, “When we were filing the case, going back and forth on the settlement, [the officer’s] lawyer straight up told me they feel like they did nothing wrong.”

This was the line city officials fed the press as well. According to reporting from the Denver Post, “An investigation by prosecutors found there was no evidence the officers committed any crimes, in part because they found they were following their training for conducting a high-risk stop of what they suspected was a stolen vehicle.” 

As a result, the consequences have been almost nonexistent. Again from the Post: “One of the officers who stopped the car, Darian Dasko, was suspended without pay for 160 hours. He and the other officer, Madisen Moen, still work for the department.” The Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office also declined to bring criminal charges against Dasko.

2024 payroll data, received via Freedom of Information request is year-to-date as of July 16, 2024.

In response to a request for disciplinary records and communication about officers’ bad behavior, Aurora officials sent an invoice requesting $94,085.15 for processing and redactions. Do you think this is the practice of a department dedicated to transparency and accountability in service to the people?

Brittany says the officers shouldn't be allowed to categorize their actions as lawful, or right. “They called it a routine traffic stop. That's not what this was.” Brittany says, “I had been parked for ten minutes before they did what they did. This shouldn’t be routine.”

In February 2024 it was announced that Brittany and the girls had settled with the city for $1.9 million. On its face, it is a significant sum, but the payment fails to make things right for several reasons. 

First, “It was never about the money.” Brittany says, “People say, oh you were compensated for it - I did not think that was worth any of it.”

Second, the harm inflicted on this family is still ongoing. “You forced my hand for my kids to see you as individuals and police as people who go after people based on the color of their skin,” she says. According to the complaint, one of Brittany’s nieces “cannot get the terrified screams of her cousins out of her mind. The girls struggle to sleep and eat. All are in therapy to attempt to help them deal with what happened that day.”

“I want them to be okay.” Brittany continues, “They are not okay. They are never going to be okay.”

Third, the settlement, legal fees, and all official time spent dealing with this matter were taxpayer-funded. This is just a fraction of the collective punishment inflicted on the people of Aurora by police tasked with protecting and serving the community. The New York Times reports: “From 2003 to 2018, the city [of Aurora] settled at least 11 police brutality cases for a total of $4.6 million, according to the A.C.L.U. of Colorado. In 2021, the city agreed to pay $15 million to the family of Elijah McClain to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit over the police confrontation in 2019 that ended his life.”

Brittany is clear about what she believes needs to be first on the priority list:

“Training needs to change, specifically when dealing with kids. I understand they have a job to do, but when they saw four kids come out of the car - everything should have changed in that moment.”

While the officers continue to enjoy job stability and benefits on the public dime, Officer Dasko even ran a failed bid for Sheriff, Brittany’s life has been upended. She left her job with the Department of Corrections as it put her in contact with multiple Aurora police officers on a regular basis, and she says she felt threatened and did not have support in the workplace.

“It became hard to stay at that job because of the attention I was getting. I was scared, not just for me but for the kids,” she says, “I had a target on my back.”

She says attention following the incident led to her house and vehicles being broken into multiple times. When speaking with Respect America, Brittany was briefly back in Colorado to wrap up some loose ends but says she has since moved out of the state.

“I do miss family, and I miss friends, I miss this place. But I do not miss the cops.”

From a distance, she has seen horrors continue to unfold in Aurora, including the recent shooting of the unarmed Kylin Lewis. The city council recently rejected a measure to offer that family an apology.

“It could have been me and those kids.” Brittany says, “Because they are cops, they can get away with it. They are the biggest gang of all. They just have a badge and a gun.”