Harris Elias, a contractor and pilot, will be receiving $400,000 from the city of Loveland, Colorado, to resolve a federal lawsuit. He accused the city’s police department of wrongfully arresting him on a DUI charge, despite blowing zeroes on a breathalyzer test.
Elias was arrested by Loveland Police Officer William Gates in January 2020. In bodycam footage of the arrest, the officer explains that he pulled Elias over for failing to signal a lane change and driving slowly. The officer asks if the driver has had anything to drink, and Elias says that he doesn’t want to answer the question. The officer then claims that he smells “the overwhelming odor of alcohol” coming from the vehicle.
The body cam footage shows Elias later taking a breath test that returns zeroes. Despite this, he is then taken to a hospital for a blood test, which would also come back negative months later. Although the district attorney eventually dropped the case against Elias, Sarah Schielke, the lawyer representing Elias, says that her client filed suit because he is “intent on exposing all at Loveland which caused this horrible event to happen.”
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“Nothing will shake from my heart the horror and shock I felt after blowing zeroes and not being set free,” said Elias. “All I can hope is that with this lawsuit, with Gates gone from the department, and with this settlement, I have saved at least one other person from having to experience what I did.”
Indeed, Schielke’s office pointed to a pattern of overzealous policing. Independent audits have found that the LPD made a habit of abandoning other calls to chase down DUI suspects. She also pointed to a ceremony celebrating Officer Gates for having completed the most DUI arrests on the force.
Elias’ lawsuit, filed in January 2022, claims that Loveland Police Chief Bob Ticer “purposefully created […] a culture of competitive pursuit of DUI arrests with reckless disregard for driver innocence, in order to generate for LPD more bragging rights, more funding, more equipment, more officers, and more (literal) trophies,” writes Schielke’s office.
She claims that this is the largest non-confidential monetary payment ever made in Colorado in a case of this nature. Although the police force and the city admit no wrongdoing, she points to the size of the settlement as proof of the validity of her client’s case. She also highlights that both Officer Gates and Chief Ticer are no longer employed with the LPD.
“There was never any question that Mr. Elias was innocent,” said Schielke. “The question instead has always been how and why was this police agency […] able to openly create, pursue, and enjoy such perverse incentives for accumulating DUI arrests with — until now — zero consequence for the arrest of innocent drivers?”
In addition to this case, Elias has also filed suit against the neighboring municipality of Fort Collins. He says that he was separately arrested there in December 2021 on suspicion of DUI. He alleges that he was jailed for three days and charged with child abuse, because his 15-year-old son was in the car with him at the time.
However, once again, Elias blew zeroes on a breath test, and his blood work came back negative, reports Business Insider. Again, the cases were dismissed against him, but he believes that he was twice the victim of a police department more focused on making DUI arrests than on protecting its community.