The report went to the DOJ's Civil Rights Division leadership, to the Denver Police Department's Internal Affairs, to the Denver City Attorney's Office, and to the FBI Civil Rights Division.
By Monday morning, Officer Brandon Cole was on administrative leave. By Tuesday, he was officially under federal investigation.
The investigation moved quickly because the evidence was ironclad. The recording showed everything: Brandon's unlawful stop based solely on a vague, suspicious-person call; his demand for ID without reasonable suspicion; his threat to search without probable cause; his attempt to arrest on false charges; his complete inability to articulate any legal justification for his actions.
But the investigation didn't stop with just that encounter. The DOJ pulled everything: Brandon's body camera footage from every shift for the past three years, his written reports, his dispatch logs, his arrest records. They analyzed it all, looking for patterns.
What they found was damning. In three years, Brandon had stopped or questioned 63 individuals he described in reports as "suspicious" or "possibly surveilling." Of those 63, 58 were visibly Muslim, either wearing hijabs or traditional Islamic clothing.
Of those 58 stops, exactly zero resulted in any criminal charges. Zero. Not a single arrest, not a single citation—just harassment.
They also found his body camera footage from those encounters. The way he spoke to Muslim residents was markedly different from how he spoke to everyone else: more aggressive, more demanding, more suspicious. The contrast was stark when you watched the footage back-to-back.
One video showed Brandon stopping a Muslim woman leaving a grocery store, demanding to search her bags because she "looked nervous." She consented because she was terrified, and he found nothing but groceries. He never apologized.
Another showed him questioning a Muslim man walking his dog in the park, asking what he was "really doing in the neighborhood" and running his name through multiple databases. The man lived two blocks away. He'd been walking that same route every morning for five years.
The pattern was undeniable. Brandon had been engaging in systematic religious discrimination for years, and nobody had stopped him because nobody had been looking closely enough—until the DOJ started looking.
And when they looked, they found even more than just Brandon's misconduct. They found his supervisors who'd ignored warning signs. They found complaints that had been dismissed without proper investigation. They found a system that had protected discriminatory behavior instead of stopping it.
Sergeant Tom Brennan had been Brandon's direct supervisor for two years. When the DOJ interviewed him, he admitted he'd noticed Brandon seemed to stop more "Middle Eastern types" than other officers. But Brennan said he never thought it was a problem because Brandon always had a reason for his stops.