Friday, January 03, 2003 - Contrary to pronouncements by mayoral candidate Ari Zavaras, the Denver Police Department never maintained a spy-file policy while Zavaras was chief, a city official says.

"It didn't have the status of being an official policy," Assistant City Attorney Stan Sharoff said of documents Zavaras released last month. "As far as I can tell, it was never a policy."

The Police Department has been embroiled in controversy since the city confirmed in March that the department had kept thousands of intelligence files on various individuals and groups.

Zavaras, stung by what he said was a question of his "management responsibility" as police chief from 1987 to 1991, produced records he said dictated policy on intelligence-gathering during his tenure. Those documents, he said, allowed gathering of such information only for criminal investigations.

The pages Zavaras released, Sharoff said, are merely "a collection of miscellaneous items" kept over the years by one-time intelligence commander Robert Cantwell, now head of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

"I think it was Bob putting together his procedures that he wanted to use," Sharoff said. Those materials, Sharoff said, were never approved or disseminated to people in the department.

INTELLIGENCE MEMO

A 1984 Denver Police Department memo, cited by Ari Zavaras, above, in a news conference last month, says in part: * The use of illegal or unauthorized methods of collecting information is absolutely prohibited. * Information will be gathered only on those organizations and/or persons that advocate criminal conduct, threatened, attempted or performed criminal acts on life or property. * Intelligence data will not be collected by members of the Intelligence Bureau on any individual merely on the basis that such person supports unpopular causes ... on the basis of ethnicity or race ... (or) on the basis of the individual's religious and/or political affiliations.

Considered a front-runner in the race for mayor, Zavaras shocked many connected with the spy-files controversy with his description of an intelligence policy.

On March 28, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city, challenging the Denver Police Department's custom of spying on peaceful protesters.

In recent depositions in that case, police officials said no formal policy on intelligence-gathering ever existed.

Zavaras said Thursday he was sticking with his contention that Cantwell's documents amounted to a spy-files policy.

"My reaction to that is you're basically contradicting the commander of the bureau who put (the policy) into place," he said. "Further than that, knowing how he operates, that would shock me if it were true."

Zavaras said he was not concerned that the spy-files controversy would affect his bid for mayor.

"I think people's expectations are pretty realistic," he said. "They realize you don't have oversight over day-to-day operations. Where they hold the template up is once the problem is revealed, if you take action."

In addition to his tenure as police chief, Zavaras served as manager of public safety, with authority over the Police Department, from August 2000 until June 2002.

Although the spy-files controversy became public while he was still manager of safety, Zavaras said he did not take any action because Mayor Wellington Webb had hired a panel to investigate the matter.

That panel later concluded that many of the files had no criminal connection and therefore should be destroyed.

Political analyst Eric Sondermann said that since Zavaras is the "law-and-order candidate" in the upcoming mayoral election, the question of what he knew about the spy files would continue to be a crucial issue.

"This story is not going to go away," Sondermann said, "and he's going to have to answer in full."

For a candidate to hold a news conference as Zavaras did Dec. 22, Sondermann said, "you only do if you have a reasonable degree of confidence that your facts or your background will squelch the story. In this case, it only threw more tinder on it."

Cantwell, the former intelligence-unit commander, backed Zavaras.

Reached Thursday at his CBI office, Cantwell said that despite the contentions of various city officials, there was indeed a policy regarding intelligence-gathering while he headed the unit. It was written for an accreditation, he said.

"It was followed, I know it was followed," Cantwell said. "Why they said that, I have no idea."

The two men vary in accounts of how they came to produce the document that Zavaras distributed at his news conference.

After reading newspaper reports that the Police Department never had an intelligence policy, Cantwell, who was head of the intelligence unit from 1983 until 1986, said he called Zavaras.

"I said, 'Gee, Z, you had a policy in place while you were chief of police,"' Cantwell recalled in an interview earlier this week. "'In fact, I still have the policy,"' he said he told a surprised Zavaras over the phone. "He said, 'You do? Wow."'

Zavaras, however, said news of the policy did not surprise him and that the issue arose while he and Cantwell had breakfast together the Friday before Zavaras' news conference.

He never viewed the entire manual that Cantwell quoted, Zavaras said, and could not remember whether he had mentioned any such policy to reporters before.

The document Zavaras produced, dated June 18, 1984, was an internal police memo from Cantwell to then Chief Tom Coogan.

The memo said that "recognizing that special care and precautions must be taken to avoid interfering with the constitutional rights of citizens ... written guidelines were implemented in October 1983."

Not so, Sharoff said. "He was quoting his own little book," he said of Cantwell. "It was about 2 inches thick, and a lot of it was just extraneous stuff" such as newspaper stories, that Cantwell took with him when he left the Police Department.

Furthermore, he said, "people working in the intelligence unit during Cantwell's tenure said they had never seen this."

Sharoff's stance is consistent with what the city has maintained during the unfolding of the spy-files lawsuit: that the Denver Police Department's intelligence unit never operated under any kind of formal procedure.

Depositions taken so far in the case speak to a sloppily run unit that operated without training or protocol for gathering information on individuals and groups who exercised free speech.

Police Chief Gerry Whitman could not be reached for comment.

Mayor Wellington Webb, former Mayor Federico Pena, and former chiefs Tom Coogan and Zavaras have all said they had no idea the intelligence unit was maintaining files that had nothing to do with criminal investigations.

Denver Post staff writer Amy Herdy can be reached at 303-820-1752 or aherdy@denverpost.com .