In September, 2009, a card dealer named Evie Oquendo arrived at her apartment, on the far east side of Las Vegas, with groceries for her fifteen-year-old son, Tanner Chamberlain. Tanner, who struggled with bipolar disorder, had stayed home from school that day, and Oquendo wanted to make beef stew, one of his favorite meals. But, before she could start cooking, Tanner became extremely agitated. Not long afterward, she discovered that he had swallowed a handful of her anti-anxiety pills. She wanted to take him to the hospital, but first she called her sister, a former New York City police officer. Her sister told her to call 911. “I said, ‘I’m not calling the police, because I’m afraid they’re gonna shoot him,’ ” Oquendo recalled. “She told me, ‘Evie, don’t be ridiculous. They’ll know how to handle it.’ ”

Tanner calmed down enough to suggest going to a nearby 7-Eleven for an iced tea, and Oquendo decided against calling the police. But her sister had already asked a family friend in Nevada to call 911, and soon officers from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department pulled up to Oquendo’s apartment building, a stucco complex with a pool and a playground. Among the group was a twenty-eight-year-old officer named Derek Colling, who had been with the department for four years. When Colling and the others approached, Tanner stood behind Oquendo, grasping his mother and holding a folding knife in one hand. Officers instructed him to drop the knife and release his mother, but he did not comply. One of the officers on the scene, who was trained in de-escalating crisis situations involving people with mental illnesses, tried to speak to Tanner. Colling trained his gun on Tanner. “Don’t shoot him!” Oquendo pleaded. Colling shot him in the head.

This was Colling’s second fatal shooting in three years: in 2006, he had been one of five officers to shoot and kill a man who pulled a gun at a gas station. In both cases, a coroner’s inquest declared the killings justified. “I did what had to be done,” Colling said, during the second inquiry. One of Colling’s childhood friends, Jedadiah Schultz, recalled meeting up with Colling shortly after Tanner’s death, at a baseball game, and asking him about the incident. “The way in which he was telling the story was like his heroic journey,” Schultz said. “I was deeply unsettled.” (Colling did not respond to requests for comment.)

In 2011, after Colling beat a videographer who was filming police activity in a suburban neighborhood, the footage went viral, and the department launched an investigation. In December, just weeks after the Las Vegas Review-Journal began publishing a series of articles on the use of lethal force by police, Colling was fired for policy violations. The city’s police department, which had a long-standing reputation as one of the most violent in the country, announced that it would be undertaking extensive reforms, in conjunction with the Department of Justice, to improve transparency and accountability.

No criminal charges were brought against Colling, and the internal investigation that led to the department’s decision was not made public. Still, Oquendo felt some sense of vindication: Colling wasn’t going to jail, but at least he’d lost his badge and his gun. She decided to pursue a civil case against Colling and the department, including a wrongful-death claim, and, in 2013, two years after she’d filed it, a federal district-court judge allowed the case to go forward.

But, in 2015, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the suit, citing qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects law-enforcement officers from civil lawsuits. Shortly afterward, while Oquendo was searching for news stories about Colling on the Internet, she got a hit from a paper in Laramie, Wyoming. Colling hadn’t left law enforcement—he’d just moved home. He was working as a patrol deputy for the Albany County sheriff’s office, which covers a forty-three-hundred-square-mile region of southeastern Wyoming, including Laramie, Colling’s home town. Oquendo was distraught. She started calling journalists and community leaders in Laramie. “I didn’t want him to kill again,” she said.

Eventually, she reached Debra Hinkel. An athletic woman with white-blond hair and a direct manner, Hinkel had lived in Laramie most of her life. She ran a few businesses in town, including the Ranger, a motel, bar, and liquor store, which her parents had owned. She was well-connected, and she had contacts at all three of the law-enforcement agencies with jurisdiction in Laramie—the police department, the sheriff’s office, and the University of Wyoming’s police department. Her middle child, Robbie Ramirez, had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in his early twenties, and, in the years since, Hinkel had come to dedicate much of her time to mental-health advocacy. Oquendo had found Hinkel’s phone number through the Laramie chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, where Hinkel served as president. After explaining her story, Oquendo urged Hinkel to use her standing in the community to agitate for Colling’s dismissal. “She was trying to get ahold of anybody she could,” Hinkel said. “She told me, ‘The guy’s dangerous.’ ”

Hinkel knew Derek Colling. His father was a highway patrolman, and his mother worked at a local school. Laramie is a college town of about thirty thousand that feels smaller. As boys, Colling and Robbie had played on the same baseball team, the Vigilantes. They had attended high school together; as members of the school choir, they travelled to Carnegie Hall. After graduating, Colling attended college in South Dakota, then explored a career in law enforcement. He got the job in Las Vegas in 2005. Robbie, meanwhile, had never left Wyoming.

Hinkel and Robbie lived a few blocks apart—she in a ranch house, he in a log-walled apartment owned by two of Hinkel’s brothers. They had a close-knit family, with relatives spread throughout the region. Robbie’s siblings, Randy and Robyn, lived about an hour away; their father, Jimmy Ramirez, lived in a small town across the Snowy Range mountains. Some months, Hinkel saw Robbie regularly. When he felt good, he coached hockey, made ceramic art, and worked at the Ranger. At other times, when he was feeling anxious or depressed, he kept to himself. A fun-loving skater in his younger days, Robbie had become exceedingly careful over the years, and police especially concerned him. After his diagnosis, he had been arrested a few times, and he wanted to avoid any similar encounters. He kept a detailed budget, and family members remember him painstakingly tracking his medications and meal plan. He spent hours tinkering with his Ford Ranger, but he was a tentative driver who rarely left Laramie. He said he needed to stay near home, where he was safe.

Hinkel decided not to tell her son about Colling, but he found out anyway. Not long after Oquendo’s call, Robbie walked into the Ranger and found his mother standing by the pool table. The Boomerang, Laramie’s daily, had just published an article about Oquendo’s civil case. Robbie sounded matter-of-fact, Hinkel recalled later, when he told her that he’d read about Colling. “He’ll probably shoot me someday,” Robbie said.

The sheriff of Albany County, David O’Malley, hired Colling in 2012, ten months after he was fired from his job in Las Vegas. Colling had applied to work for the town’s police department, too, but his history disqualified him. “We didn’t even finish his background,” Dale Stalder, the chief of the Laramie Police Department, said. A Laramie law-enforcement veteran told me that, when he heard that Colling was working for O’Malley, he was unsurprised. “The sheriff’s office is kind of a second-chance oasis for cops,” he said.

O’Malley is widely known for his role investigating the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten and left to die on the outskirts of Laramie, in 1998. O’Malley, who was then the head of investigations at the Laramie Police Department, worked with a detective from the sheriff’s department to build the case that convicted two men of Shepard’s murder. The story garnered international attention, helped to catalyze a reckoning with anti-gay violence, and inspired a play, “The Laramie Project,” that was produced as a touring show. O’Malley became an outspoken public figure, advocating for national hate-crime legislation and speaking openly about his former anti-gay bigotry. He marched at Pride events, attended drag-queen bingo, and spoke out against a book that cast aspersions on Shepard. He left the police department in 2004 and, in 2010, ran for sheriff as a Democrat, winning by nearly twenty points.

The American sheriff—especially the Western sheriff—has always occupied a role that is both functional and performative, and O’Malley seemed intuitively aware of the outward-facing aspects of the job. He wore a bushy mustache and snap shirts, and he projected warmth, relying on folksy lingo. He was widely liked, and he easily won reëlection twice. But among law enforcement his department’s reputation was mixed, marred by a handful of cases of alleged misconduct. Stalder, Laramie’s police chief, told me that the expertise of sheriff’s departments varies widely. “There’s a huge disparity,” he said. “Some are very professional. Some are much less professional.” When I asked where O’Malley’s department fit within that spectrum, he said, “I think I’ll leave that one alone.”

Still, O’Malley’s popularity seemed undimmed, and he appeared confident deflecting scrutiny. A few years after Colling was hired, when local journalists found out about Colling’s history in Las Vegas, O’Malley defended him staunchly. In an interview with a local radio station and news site, he said, “The fact that he was terminated didn’t give me any real pause, because they didn’t move to decertify him as a law enforcement officer.” He added, “If you don’t believe that a person has any business in law enforcement, then you move for decertification. If they had done that, I couldn’t have considered Derek.”

Like the disbarring of an attorney, or the revocation of a doctor’s license, the decertification of a law-enforcement officer, which is handled by individual states, is meant to prevent bad actors from returning to the profession. (Wyoming, along with a few other states, recognizes decertification elsewhere as immediately disqualifying.) But standards for decertification vary widely. In a handful of states, like California, there is no process at all for removing an officer’s certification; in others, like Nevada, decertification is rare. Even though Colling had been fired following allegations of police brutality, his dismissal did not meet the state threshold for decertification. Kelly McMahill, a deputy chief at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, who oversaw the internal investigation that led to his firing, told me that, had the state initiated an inquiry, “It wouldn’t even have come close to pulling his certification.”

In recent years, the very idea of problem officers has become a flashpoint in the public discourse on police violence: when politicians and police chiefs blame the failures of policing on a handful of officers, they seem to be ignoring the systemic issues that plague American law enforcement. But it is widely accepted in the field of decertification studies that a small number of officers account for a large number of civilian complaints; if implemented fairly and consistently, decertification can serve as a vital mechanism for removing the worst actors. “Most professions have a way of getting rid of bad professionals,” Roger Goldman, an emeritus professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law, who is an expert on decertification, told me. “So why not police?”

In 2014, after a Cleveland police officer named Timothy Loehmann shot and killed Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old Black child who was holding a toy gun, an investigation revealed that Loehmann had previously been deemed unfit for duty at another Ohio police department. Ohio decertifies law-enforcement officers in the event of felony convictions, but a grand jury declined to indict Loehmann for Rice’s killing. Although he was eventually fired from the Cleveland Police Department, on the grounds that he had falsified his employment history, he remained eligible to work in law enforcement.

Last year, the legal scholars Ben Grunwald and John Rappaport published a report, “The Wandering Officer,” that provided the first wide-scale analysis of officers, like Loehmann and Colling, who have lost employment at one law-enforcement agency and then found a new job at another. Analyzing data from nearly five hundred Florida police agencies over a thirty-year period, they found that such officers were more likely than their peers “to be fired from their next job or to receive a complaint for a ‘moral character violation.’ ”

Officers who have previously worked at large metropolitan agencies typically have extensive training, which can make them appealing as prospective hires for smaller departments with less funding, or rural departments with fewer applicants. When Colling attended Wyoming’s law-enforcement academy for basic training—a requirement for most new detention officers—he graduated at the top of his class and was recognized for exemplary physical fitness and marksmanship. The Albany County Sheriff’s Office is well funded—last year, it had $1.8 million in expenditures—but O’Malley said that he had struggled to recruit officers. “In the seventies and early eighties, you had people knocking down the door,” he told me. The last time he posted a job, he said, there were twenty applicants, but only eight showed up for the physical and psychological tests. Of those eight, he said, “We had one that our panel said they would recommend to hire.” Matthew Hickman, a professor of criminal justice at Seattle University, said, “Police departments in rural jurisdictions are just desperate for officers. And that’s where some of these guys end up.”

Still, O’Malley maintained that his agency had strict hiring procedures. He told me that Colling had been interviewed by a panel, which included representatives from the sheriff’s office, the police department, and the University of Wyoming Police Department. (He declined to share the interviewers’ names, citing the confidentiality of personnel records.) O’Malley also said that Colling had passed a background check: “I had a list of probably sixty people that were supervisory and peers.” He could not tell me exactly how many were interviewed, but he stood by comments he had made in the Boomerang, in 2014, in which he called Colling “the best man for the job.”

McMahill, a deputy chief in Las Vegas, was alarmed by the circumstances of Colling’s hiring in Wyoming. “I am shocked he got a job with another police agency,” she said. She said that the details from the investigation into Colling that she led, in 2011, were confidential. But she did tell me that Colling was one of a handful of officers who were involved in incidents that prompted the agency to change the way it monitored and supported personnel following use-of-force incidents. “What we realized is that so many of these officers, they’re going to relive their officer-involved shootings time and time and time again,” she told me. McMahill now sits on Nevada’s Peace Officers Standards and Training (post) commission, which certifies and decertifies officers. She told me that she hoped for reforms to the state’s decertification statute, and for more consistency across the country. “I think the answer to that is really, every state—state to state—is going to have to be much more lenient on what it takes to decertify someone.” She added, “We don’t want people like Derek Colling to remain with his post certificate.”

Debra Hinkel, like many Laramie residents, was unaware of Colling’s presence on the force until well after he had been hired, when the press got the story and Oquendo made calls around town. But she was inclined to trust O’Malley. Her kids had gone to school with his kids. She had once switched parties to vote for him, and they sat together on a mental-health board. She had also seen Robbie’s relationship with local law enforcement improve since he was first diagnosed. In the early years, Robbie and the rest of the family struggled to manage his condition. In 2004, Robbie punched an uncle at a family cabin, and was escorted to the hospital by sheriff’s deputies, who later tackled him to the ground so that a nurse could inject him with an antipsychotic. Robbie resisted, injuring two officers. After the incident, Hinkel became interested in crisis-intervention-team (C.I.T.) programs, which encourage the development of mental-health infrastructure and teach de-escalation techniques to law-enforcement officers. After attending a C.I.T. panel in San Diego, she met with a commander at the Laramie Police Department and representatives from the local hospital. Laramie’s C.I.T. program became among the first in the state.

Robbie’s final arrest for violent behavior was in 2010, when he punched a man outside of the Ranger. After that, he abided strictly by his court-ordered probation. He picked up skateboarding again, and, after buying a classical guitar while on vacation with his father, in Mazatlán, he started playing music with a local group. In 2016, the Wyoming legislature slashed funding for Medicaid, and Robbie became convinced that he needed to keep his income as low as possible in order to prevent his benefits from changing. He eventually stopped working, and his mental health declined. When Hinkel sold the Ranger, in 2018, he lost another anchor. But he tried to stay active, regularly visiting the Laramie skate park.

At this point, local law enforcement knew how to handle Robbie when he was in an anxious spell. Stalder, the police chief, told me that, during calls to Robbie’s apartment, officers stood outside the door and talked in a gentle voice until he calmed down. The department had a be-on-the-lookout alert set up for Robbie’s vehicles, so officers would know to respond with calm in the event of a traffic stop. “Because of the officers’ abilities to create that space and that time, things worked out,” Stalder said.

In November, 2018, Robbie drove his Ranger west on Grand Avenue, a commercial area near the university. He was travelling significantly under the speed limit, and soon a patrol vehicle from the sheriff’s office pulled in behind him. Robbie moved into the left lane, then turned across traffic, flipping on his signal a few seconds late. The patrol car followed. Robbie turned again, this time without a signal. The patrol car flashed its lights, and they both pulled over. Robbie was about a hundred yards from home.

Derek Colling is trim and muscular, with a blond crew cut that was, that day, covered by a dark beanie. He strode toward Robbie’s car. In college, Colling had been a two-hundred-and-fifteen-pound football player, and he still maintained an athletic build, training regularly in a form of martial arts called Krav Maga, developed for the Israeli military. When he reached the passenger’s side of the car, he told Robbie to roll down the window. Robbie refused, and pointed to his apartment building, which was visible across the street. Colling demanded again, and Robbie’s responses turned agitated. Then he started the car, and pulled away. (For someone fleeing the police, he drove slowly; before turning into his apartment’s parking lot, he used his turn signal.) Colling ran to his cruiser and followed in pursuit, calling for backup. Robbie parked next to his apartment, at the end of the parking lot, and got out. Officers trained in responding to calls involving people experiencing mental-health crises are taught how to speak in a calm voice and maintain distance. Colling pulled up quickly, pinning in Robbie’s truck and leaving him effectively cornered.

Colling pulled out his Taser and pistol and yelled, “Get your hands up now!” He approached, weapons drawn, closing the space between them. “Get your hands up now,” he repeated. He then deployed the Taser: its barbs stuck in Robbie’s shirt but didn’t appear to take effect. “Don’t shoot at me,” Robbie said. Colling tried again. Robbie covered his head, cursed, and charged. As the men grappled, Colling fired his pistol, and Robbie fell. Colling called for medical assistance, and held Robbie’s body to the ground. (He would later say that he still considered Robbie a potential threat.) With the assistance of a responding officer, he handcuffed Robbie, who lay bleeding. Another officer arrived and administered CPR. Colling had shot Robbie three times, including in the back. An ambulance transported him to a hospital. Hinkel arrived shortly afterward. In the lobby, she was informed that her son was dead.

Six days later, a vigil for Robbie was held at the Laramie skate park. More than a hundred people came to light candles. Later, at the memorial service, a friend of Robbie’s from the skate park delivered a eulogy, and Hinkel gave a short speech. She thought that more of Robbie’s friends might speak. But, she said, “They just couldn’t. They were just so angry.”

Hinkel walks quickly, and often wears a grin that conveys preparedness rather than joy. Following Robbie’s death, his older brother, Randy, tried to avoid returning to Laramie. Hinkel left frequently, to escape, but always returned home. “I don’t know how my mom does it,” Randy said. “She can’t go to the grocery store without someone wanting to talk about it.”

A deeply spiritual person, Hinkel felt that her son’s death had happened for a reason, and that some change should come of it. But she also tended to be trusting of local authorities. In the press, she praised O’Malley and Peggy Trent, the county attorney, with whom she was friendly. She told the Boomerang that her son’s death was the fault of “one police officer and not the whole force.” When the state announced that its Department of Criminal Investigations (D.C.I.) would conduct an inquiry into the shooting, she trusted that the system would deliver justice.

But others had started to organize around the shooting. After hearing about Robbie’s death, a graduate student named Karlee Provenza decided to start an advocacy group, which came to be called Albany County for Proper Policing (acopp). Twenty-four people showed up to the first meeting, which Provenza held at her house, a one-story home on Laramie’s west side, with a porch decorated by deer skulls. She served deer chili. One of Robbie’s uncles attended; Hinkel did not.

The week after Robbie’s vigil, Trent arranged a private viewing of Colling’s dash-camera and body-camera footage for Robbie’s family, including Hinkel, Ramirez, and their children Randy and Robyn. O’Malley was there, too. He cried as the tape rolled. “I felt bad for the family,” he told me later. Robyn hugged him and told him that she did not blame him for Robbie’s death. Randy felt different. “You did this,” he said to O’Malley. Hinkel left the room.

Trent eventually decided to gather a grand jury to determine whether Colling should be charged with a felony. Grand juries almost always convene in the absence of a judge or defense counsel, giving the prosecutor great influence. According to Kate Levine, a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, prosecutors often present exculpatory information during cases involving law-enforcement officers. “This is part of that careful, balanced presentation that is absolutely just never done for anyone but police officers,” Levine told me. Prosecutors have an incentive to maintain a good relationship with the police department, since they depend on the coöperation of law enforcement to build other cases, and jurors tend to trust and sympathize with law enforcement. Courts grant officers significant leeway in use-of-force cases: if officers who claim self-defense can demonstrate that they feared for their life or someone else’s, they can almost always avoid conviction. Rachel Harmon, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said that the legal standards “are mostly vague. And so they give a lot of room for officers who perceive a threat to use force.”

Shortly before the grand jury convened, Hinkel attended a community forum, where she finally met Provenza. They discussed the upcoming grand jury, which would convene under seal, concealing the proceedings from public scrutiny. Provenza was concerned that, if the grand jury declined to indict, it might create the impression that Robbie’s killing had been justified. “Debbie kind of brushed it aside,” Provenza told me. “Then, I think, she watched it happen.”

The grand jury, which met in January, 2019, was tasked with determining whether to indict Colling on a charge of involuntary manslaughter. Trent presented jurors with evidence that had been gathered by the D.C.I. Prepared by multiple investigators, including Tina Trimble, who was also the president of the Wyoming Fraternal Order of Police, the D.C.I. report provided a menacing portrayal of Robbie, noting that his apartment was extremely dirty and suggesting that he had not been taking his medication. (The report wasn’t released publicly until months later, under pressure from news outlets including the Boomerang and WyoFile, a nonprofit that has covered Robbie’s case extensively. Through a supervisor, Trimble declined an interview request.) The report briefly covered Colling’s two previous shootings, but it failed to mention his firing from the Las Vegas police department.

In an interview with Colling, which investigators waited to conduct until four days after the shooting, he claimed that he had not recognized Robbie during the encounter. But he also suggested that he had heard enough stories about Robbie’s past to consider him dangerous, providing secondhand accounts of encounters between Robbie and law enforcement that took place years before he joined the sheriff’s office. Only after Colling viewed body-camera footage did he come to the conclusion that Robbie might have been holding a key during their scuffle. “Colling remarked that he never saw the keys,” Trimble wrote, “but that he felt like it was an ‘edged weapon’ after viewing the video.”

The jurors listened to Colling’s interview, and to testimony from Trimble and from a use-of-force expert who has defended police officers in misconduct cases. One of the members of the grand jury told me that the group was instructed not to consider Colling’s history. (Later, in a press conference, Trent said that presenting the facts of Colling’s prior shootings would have taken away “the relevancy of the facts of the case.”) Much of the testimony, the juror said, “was framed in a way to say that law-enforcement officers had this different standard applied to them because of the parameters of their occupation.” The juror added that, for a charge to stick, “I feel like they have to scream out, ‘I’m going to kill you on purpose and I don’t care.’ And it has to be on camera.” (Trent said that she could not discuss the details of the grand jury, beyond her public comments.)

After three days of proceedings, the grand jury declined to indict Colling. O’Malley later moved Colling to an investigative role. Hinkel felt betrayed. “The whole good-ol’-boy aspect of protecting somebody who’s done something like that is totally confusing to me,” she said. She reconnected with Provenza, who was trying to get the county commissioners to establish a community oversight board for the sheriff’s office. Hinkel was impressed by Provenza’s persistence in a state where aggressive reform efforts are not the political norm. (In February, a former Albany County attorney wrote to Provenza, in an e-mail, “You should exercise caution in your efforts. The people you are challenging have the power of the entire state government to bring against you.”) Hinkel and Provenza discussed policing issues and decided to start working together on advocacy. In May, Hinkel wrote an op-ed that criticized O’Malley and the law-enforcement system: “Perhaps we need to look at de-certification of these officers so they do not continue to have opportunities to injure or kill citizens.” Provenza soon started gathering signatures on a petition that called for Colling’s decertification.

In Wyoming, as in many other states, decertification decisions are handled by the state’s post commission. (Most post agencies were established following the civil unrest of the nineteen-sixties, when authorities in cities across the U.S. responded to civil-rights protesters with military tactics.) In January, 2020, Hinkel and Provenza drove seventy-five icy miles north to a diner in Wheatland, where they met Chris Walsh, the director of the state’s post commission. Provenza presented Walsh with a petition for Colling’s decertification, which had nearly thirteen hundred signatures.

Typically, decertification cases are brought by police chiefs or sheriffs themselves. “The very people deciding whether to hire wandering officers are the people who need to decide whether to discipline them,” Ben Grunwald, the legal scholar, told me. But in Wyoming, citizens can file a grievance directly to the post commission. At the end of the meeting with Walsh, Hinkel filed a written complaint. Walsh began an investigation.

In April, Provenza announced that she was running as a Democrat for a seat in the legislature. Hinkel helped with the campaign, writing postcards to voters. A few weeks later, George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin, a white officer with eighteen prior complaints on his record. Protests erupted across the country, including in Laramie, where they attracted a diverse and durable crowd. Provenza attended, collecting more signatures for the decertification petition. Hinkel struggled to watch the video of Floyd’s death, and the similarity of the officers’ names—Derek Colling, Derek Chauvin—disturbed her. “Too many synchronicities,” she told me.

She left town to go rafting in Oregon. When she arrived home, in June, hundreds of people were marching in the streets, many of them chanting her son’s name. The marches continued daily. (Laramie police officers later arrested protesters for disorderly conduct and, in one case, “amplified noise,” even as counter-protesters in trucks with modified exhaust systems blasted them with diesel smoke.)

One law-enforcement veteran in Laramie told me that the events of the summer had shaken his foundational beliefs about his profession. He had started to reëxamine the assumptions that he had been trained to believe. When he had first seen the footage of Robbie’s death, he had thought Colling acted properly. “Now, looking at it through the way society is changing,” he told me, “it makes me question if it was a valid shoot.” For a long time, he had thought that the criminal-justice system was flawed but generally fair. “Having to now look at everything,” he said, “I’m starting to realize that—no, it is not fair. It is very skewed.” Another Laramie law-enforcement officer told me that Robbie’s death had deeply saddened and demoralized many of his colleagues. “With Robbie, it’s deeply personal,” he said. “Because Robbie was us.” He thought about Colling, and said, “Why was he hired?”

Walsh declined to comment on the specifics of the case, but he outlined a scenario that could hypothetically support decertification: “If a person were hired illegally, against Wyoming state statute, because, let’s say, information from another state is pertinent to their employment here, and through an investigation I found out that something had been overlooked”—that, he said, would be relevant. His investigation is ongoing. A hearing for Colling has not yet been scheduled.

In August, I met Sheriff O’Malley at the Albany County Courthouse, an impressive stone building on Grand Avenue. Inside, the receptionist greeted me from behind a gleaming one-way mirror. O’Malley came out and offered me a friendly handshake. He walked with his back slightly stooped. As he turned into his office, I could see Colling in a room across the way. O’Malley closed the door.

Hinkel had recently filed a twenty-million-dollar lawsuit on charges of wrongful death, listing the county, Colling, and O’Malley as defendants. O’Malley declined to discuss Hinkel’s suit directly, but his comments suggested that the public had developed an unfair impression of his office. He offered a quotation from Mark Twain (apocryphal, as it turns out): “No amount of evidence will ever convince an idiot.” He was concerned that the protests in Laramie and around the country were damaging the reputation of law enforcement. “The career, the profession, being associated with racism and excessive force and everything, that’s just—it’s not the case,” he said. “That happens, and there’s people in this profession that need to be out of it.” But Colling, he said, was not one of them. He stood by his decision to hire him. He said he planned to retire soon and move to Florida. “I can fish twelve months a year without cutting a hole in the ice,” he said, chuckling. He added, “I don’t know that I’ll ever come back.” He announced his resignation later that month.

O’Malley’s successor, Aaron Appelhans, was the first Black sheriff in Wyoming’s history. Appelhans said that he was focussed on improving services for the mentally ill and recruiting from underserved communities. “I’m not really sure law enforcement has put in enough work to really see the change,” he told me. Colling was reassigned to a job at the county detention center. O’Malley moved away; Trent took a job in Kansas. In November, on the anniversary of Robbie’s death, Karlee Provenza won her election by a hundred and sixty votes. Hinkel cried when she heard the news. “It’s not all about justice,” she said. “It’s about a need for a change.”

Still, Hinkel found herself spending more and more time away from home. She went to Colorado, Santa Fe, Elko. “There’s a heaviness in my heart every time I drive into Laramie,” she said. “I still have to leave periodically to just regroup.” One of her trips took her to Las Vegas, where she looked up Evie Oquendo. When they met, at a restaurant in a video poker lounge, they laughed at their similar statures—both women stand about five feet tall. Since losing the appeal for her case, Oquendo had been unable to work. At her apartment, she kept Tanner’s room as it had been, with his clothes still in the closet. She struggled to sleep, and her dreams were bad. Still, she said, she saw in Hinkel’s lawsuit a glimmer of hope. Maybe, she thought, it would yield a different result from her own.

Oquendo rarely left Las Vegas, and she was impressed by Hinkel’s adventurous nature. They talked about taking a trip one day. “Kind of a heck of a way to become kindred spirits,” Hinkel said. They finished lunch, and Hinkel started the long drive through Utah and Colorado and into the vast plains of Wyoming. After she arrived, her phone rang. It was Oquendo, calling to make sure she had got home safely.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/how-violent-cops-stay-in-law-enforcement