One of the finalists for Juneauʼs Chief of Police position is Derek Bos, who also applied for other police chief jobs in Southeast in 2018 and 2019.
Last year, as chief of police in Brush — a small town in eastern Colorado — Bos led an investigation that left the town divided. It targeted two school administrators who stored explicit photos of a minor as evidence in a sexting investigation.
A judge dismissed the charges, and the school board reinstated the administrators. But both men faced charges that could have put them in prison for years and forced them to register as sex offenders.
On Thursday, Bos told KTOO in an email that he “would not change the overall actions or direction of the investigation,” and that each step of the investigation was “carefully vetted with wisdom and discernment before any action was taken.” He also described the investigation as a “victim focused response.”
But Shannon Najmabadi, who reported on the investigation for the Colorado Sun, told KTOO that it’s rare for cases like this to lead to prosecution. She said the alleged victim and her family were strongly against the case, and they felt the prosecution — and Bos’s press releases about it — did not respect their wishes.
Najmabadi, who is now with the Wall Street Journal, spoke with KTOOʼs Yvonne Krumrey about what happened in Brush.
Listen:
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Shannon Najmabadi: So it was a case of sexting. A parent had reported that these images were being shared to the high school. So they began investigating it. And the way that this tip came in, it went to both high school administrators and the police department. And the high school administrators next morning started to investigate, which is what they’re expected to do when they get a tip of this nature.
So the administrators talked to students involved and at one point, they took images of these photos, these sexually explicit photos as evidence.This man took it on his work phone and transferred them to a cloud-based school server.
And this is where it gets a little bit complicated. Basically, this is pretty standard practice at this high school, you know, if they confiscate marijuana, or something like that, and illicit drug, they take a photo of it as evidence, and they put it into this server where they keep records of disciplinary files.
So, while there isn’t any allegation that the administrators kept these photos for sexual gratification, it is still illegal under state law, the way the state statute has been written, knowingly possessing any kind of image that could be classified as child pornography is a violation of this state statute, that what we can just call it like the child porn statute. So no matter the intent, if you have it, you legally are in possession of child porn, basically. And the only exceptions are law enforcement officers, like police officers that are investigating the case.
So if we go back to the beginning, when the tip came in, it also went to the police department. And it’s not clear why, but it took them a while to follow up on this case.
And they later arrested the two high school administrators involved. And they put out press releases that used really strong language, referring to what had happened as atrocities. And this case ended up going into the court system, the prosecutor decided to prosecute these men. And ultimately, it was thrown out by a judge.
However, the girl in the photos — so the alleged victim in this case — who had the photos of her, stored by the high school, her parents and her were very strongly against the case, they felt that even the fact that it was mentioned in press releases and coming up in these court hearings, was almost a re-victimization and that their wishes weren’t being respected.
Yvonne Krumrey: It seems like you looked into other cases like this, to see how common it was for people to face charges in a situation like this. What did you learn, in terms of the decision to charge and prosecute the school officials?
Shannon Najmabadi: It’s not common. I think that basically, these cases happen, probably more than we know about, because sexting has become something that’s very ubiquitous among high school-age students, and administrators may not know exactly what the right process is. It seems like there isn’t really a standardized training that tells administrators, “Hey, if you deal with this kind of a sexting case, if you somehow come into possession of these images, you could be arrested, you could face jail time.” And while that might be common sense to some people, it doesn’t come up in training. There’s no real way that people find out about this, except through conferences and things like that.
That said, it doesn’t seem like this leads to, actually, a prosecution very often at all.
Yvonne Krumrey: What can you tell us about how this investigation affected the community?
Shannon Najmabadi: It really divided this town, as far as I could tell, with people that supported the police and those that supported this administrator, and the school district in general. And it led to kind of unusual events — people having protests outside the courthouse very often — these packed hearings where people would show up wearing the school colors, or T-shirts that expressed support for these administrators. And that might sound not out of place in a big city, but it was, as far as I could tell, extremely uncommon in this community. So, this case went on for quite a long time. And it was a huge issue during that time.
Yvonne Krumrey: In the end, the charges were dropped and the administrators went back to work. Meanwhile, Bos left town – he took another job. He says he didn’t leave because of the controversy. What’s your sense of the position that all of this left Bos in, as the community’s top public safety officer?
Shannon Najmabadi: I don’t really know what position it left Chief Bos in. I do know that what he told me was that he took a job in Eagle, which is another place in Colorado, and he said that that police chief was retiring and had initially reached out to him in May, before a lot of this blew up in Brush. He said that he submitted an application and then later withdrew from consideration because this case had come up. And when this town Eagle reached out to him again, he did agree to take the position, and I believe that he ended up starting in December of 2022. So less than a year ago.
Juneau residents can meet Bos and the other finalists, Joshua Kingsbury, current Juneau Officer Krag Campbell next week at townhall meetings. Bos will appear Thursday at 5:30 at City Hall.
