Except Brandon's reasons were consistently pretextual and unsupported by evidence: suspicious behavior that turned out to be normal activities; matching descriptions of suspects in crimes that didn't exist or had already been solved; security concerns in neighborhoods with no actual security issues.
The DOJ asked Brennan why he'd never questioned these patterns, why he'd never pulled Brandon's stop data, why he'd never reviewed the body camera footage from these encounters. Brennan didn't have good answers. The truth was, he hadn't wanted to look. Looking would have required action; action would have created conflict. So he'd looked the other way.
Sergeant Brennan was demoted and transferred to a desk job. He took early retirement six months later.
The DOJ also uncovered something particularly disturbing in their review of Internal Affairs files. Remember those 47 complaints from Muslim residents? When investigators looked at how those complaints had been handled, they found a clear pattern of inadequate investigation.
One complaint came from a Muslim woman named Yasmin Hassan. She'd been stopped by Brandon while leaving a mosque after Friday prayers. Brandon had demanded to know where she was going, asked to see inside her purse, and questioned her about the mosque and who attended services there. Yasmin had filed a detailed complaint, including the date, time, location, and Brandon's badge number.
The Internal Affairs investigation consisted of:
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Reading Brandon's report, which claimed he'd stopped her because her vehicle matched a description of a car involved in a hit-and-run that had occurred three weeks earlier;
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Asking Brandon if he'd acted appropriately (he said yes); and
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Closing the case as "unfounded" without ever interviewing Yasmin or reviewing any body camera footage.
When DOJ investigators pulled Brandon's body camera from that day, they found the entire encounter recorded. Yasmin's vehicle looked nothing like the hit-and-run suspect vehicle, which was actually a truck. Brandon never asked about the hit-and-run; he focused entirely on where she'd been and what she was doing at the mosque. The body camera footage completely contradicted his written report. Internal Affairs had never bothered to watch it.
The DOJ found this pattern repeated across multiple complaints: cursory investigations, automatic credibility given to officer statements, little to no effort to gather evidence or interview complainants. The system wasn't designed to find misconduct; it was designed to dismiss complaints.
The Internal Affairs lieutenant who'd overseen these investigations, Lieutenant Mark Davidson, was interviewed by the DOJ. He defended his work, claiming limited resources meant he had to prioritize complaints that seemed most serious. When asked how he determined seriousness without investigating, he couldn't provide a clear answer.
Lieutenant Davidson was also demoted. He filed a grievance with the police union, claiming he was being scapegoated for systemic problems. The grievance was denied. Davidson resigned.
The Denver Police Department's Internal Affairs Division conducted its own investigation parallel to the federal one. Their findings mirrored the DOJ's: Brandon had violated departmental policies on bias-free policing, constitutional standards for stops and searches, proper documentation of encounters, and professional conduct. The investigation recommended immediate termination.