A Denver Police Department officer was fired last month after he was found to have repeatedly asked a domestic violence victim out for coffee and accessed her social media accounts about 70 times on his department-issued phone.

Investigators also found that Ofc. Kendall Albert had used Facebook and Instagram on the device to access women’s social media accounts and view them in bikinis, lingerie and in suggestive poses hundreds of times, according to a letter from Wendy Shea, the acting deputy director of Denver Public Safety. When interviewed by investigators about the matter, Albert was evasive and did not fully answer questions.

Albert and Ofc. Matthew Knuth, both with the DPD, responded to a domestic violence call in the area of East 6th Avenue and North Ogden Street on Sept. 13, 2024, according to the letter. Upon arrival, they found a man visibly intoxicated; police arrested him at the conclusion of the call.

A few days after the incident, Det. Julia Weinheimer reached out to the victim for a follow-up investigatory interview, per the letter. During that conversation, the victim said that one of the officers, later identified as Albert, kept approaching her with follow up questions that she didn’t think were relevant to the situation.

“And then the one officer text me, he got my number off the call,” the victim told Weinheimer, according to the letter. “[He] text me and asked me to go to coffee … with him while he was still on duty.”

Screenshots provided to police by the victim showed that Albert was texting her from his personal cell phone, per the letter, and included several occasions from the hours after the call.

The first began at 11:40 p.m. the same night as the call, and ended with the victim joking about crashing on Interstate 25 to which Albert replied “you can’t die yet we haven’t even grabbed some coffee lol” followed with “what are your days off.”

Two other exchanges included in the letter show Albert reaching out to the victim at 1:44 a.m. and 5:04 a.m. the next day.

During a follow-up interview a few months later, the victim noted that she did not expect the officer to talk to her in such a manner.

“I could tell he was trying to flirt with me and stuff before, because he was telling me, like, not to stay with my boyfriend and stuff like that,” the victim told investigators, according to the letter. “So, like, obviously already when that happened, it was kind of clear that it was, like, unprofessional.”

On Sept. 24, 2024, about 10 days after the call, Denver police sergeants served Albert with a notice of complaint, a no contact order and a do not discuss order, the letter says. They also returned later in the day to confiscate his department-issued cellphone, which he provided the passcode for.

The following day, investigators extracted data from Albert’s cellphone and found that the officer had installed the Facebook and Instagram apps and used them to access women’s social media accounts. Authorities found hundreds of images of unknown women, including several of them in bikinis, lingerie or suggestive and/or sexual in nature.

Detectives also found that Albert had used the phone to access the victim’s Facebook and Instagram profiles approximately 70 times across eight days, according to the letter. Multiple images he accessed showed her in a bikini.

During his interview, Albert denied that he was trying to start a romantic relationship with the victim, saying he was just carrying on conversation as his reasoning for why he texted her at 5 a.m., according to the letter. He also said that getting coffee with her was “for social purposes.”

The officer also could not provide investigators with a reason for why he had accessed the social media photos of the victim or other women, saying that he had just seen them “while scrolling through social media.”

Albert also told investigators that he had looked up the victim’s profile because he wanted to see if she was back with her boyfriend who was an alcoholic and abusive toward her, the letter says. He added that he did not think looking up her profile was inappropriate conduct.

Albert’s attorney contended that there was enough evidence for a 90-day suspension in the case, including that the officer had accepted responsibility for his actions and that issues going on in his personal life — which the letter notes as him arguing with his girlfriend — made him an “easy target” for the victim.

Nonetheless, Shea reasoned in the letter that because Albert texted the victim after the incident, forwarded her license information to his personal phone and accessed about 70 images of her on social media — multiple of which depicted her in a bikini — without any real explanation for his actions, his behavior disregarded the ethical standards of the DPD.

“Overall, Officer Albert demonstrated a troubling lack of accountability for his misconduct during his [investigatory] interview,” Shea wrote. “The example [he] set is egregious and reflects poorly on the Denver Police Department and everything it stands for.”

Because Albert demonstrated a willful disregard for department values, a serious lack of integrity in relation to his position as a police officer and displayed “egregious misconduct,” Shea determined that his actions had provided adequate grounds for termination.