A former Colorado police officer was sentenced to 45 days in jail and three years of probation for failing to intervene during the arrest of a 73-year-old woman with dementia who was assaulted by a different police officer in June 2020, the New York Times reports. The officer, Daria Jalali, formerly of the Loveland Police Department, pled guilty to failure to intervene with an officer using excessive force. The charge stemmed from a law created in 2020 as part of a police reform bill after racial justice protests across the nation. The law requires police officers to stop other officers from using excessive force and to report such instances.
Jalali failed to comply with the law after then-Loveland officer Austin Hopp assaulted Karen Garner, then 73, who had been arrested on suspicion of shoplifting $13.88 worth of items from a Walmart. Garner has dementia and sensory aphasia, which impair her ability to understand and communicate, and she had forgotten to pay for the items. She was severely injured during the arrest. A lawsuit filed against the city of Loveland stated that the officers who arrested Garner broke a bone in her arm and dislocated her shoulder and that she had not been given medical attention for six hours. Hopp pleaded guilty to second-degree assault in March and was sentenced to five years in prison and three years of parole. Loveland said it would pay a $3 million settlement to Garner.