Security Firm Fails to Muzzle Beating Victim Before RTD Vote to Replace It
At a meeting tonight, August 11, the board of the Regional Transportation District will consider a resolution to terminate the contract of Allied Universal Security Services by year’s end and reallocate $27.3 million that RTD pays the firm in order to invest in what’s described as “the expansion of mental, behavioral and social supports.”
Allied recently faced another challenge in another venue — federal court — and lost badly. The company asked for a gag order against Raverro Stinnett, a Denver artist who recently filed a lawsuit after being brutally beaten at Union Station by three of Allied’s security guards in April 2018. Last week, U.S. Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter slapped down this request with extreme prejudice.
“Lawsuits, and in particular lawsuits of a constitutional dimension involving interactions between private citizens and government actors, frequently occur in a broader social context,” Neuriter said in his opinion. “There is a strong public interest in having a robust debate about such disputed interactions, and a party who claims to have been wronged by unconstitutional or otherwise tortious conduct by a government entity is free to try to obtain vindication by any number of means, including by using his or her First Amendment rights to educate the public, to try to bring public pressure on the defendants to effectuate a settlement, or even to educate the defendants to ensure that the wrongful conduct never happens to anyone else.”