Former Colorado Speaker of the House Terrance Carroll occasionally suits up for the Colorado Rangers as a reserve law enforcement officer to help smaller communities, a throw-back to his early days as a campus officer at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“It really is a good way to give back to the community in a proactive way,” said Carroll, the newly minted chief of legal and external affairs for Denver Public Schools.
Reserve officers such as Carroll receive different levels of training in Colorado. Some, including Rangers, are certified through the state’s law-enforcement process — there are about 400 of them. Many have firearms training, but others have no training at all.
Sheriffs can appoint just about anyone they want as members of their county posses. Most don’t carry guns, but some may, provided they have a permit. State certification is not required. Their duties and the level of supervision they have are decided by the sheriffs and police chiefs that use them.
Reserve officers, whether they’re members of posses, Rangers or other groups, are deployed across Colorado, from small mountain towns to rural counties on the far eastern plains. Tight budgets make it difficult to have the number of full-time paid officers a community needs, and the help offered by the Rangers and posses are immeasurable.
“Certified police reserves are pretty common in Colorado, and I had a posse that was very valuable to the office,” said Chris Johnson, former sheriff of Otero County and now executive director of the County Sheriffs of Colorado. “They would ride and drive and work directly with the full-time sheriff’s officer.”
Posses came into focus last week with news that Yuma County Sheriff Chad Day, who also is president of the county sheriffs group, brought onto his volunteer team three out-of-towners that included politically connected New York hedge fund manager Robert Mercer.
State law seems to contradict itself about residency requirements, saying sheriffs “may call to their aid such person(s) of their county as they may deem necessary” to assist in any matter, but also saying they may deputize anyone “in writing to do particular acts” without making any restriction to residency.
Day’s office received a new $64,428 truck in 2016 from a foundation controlled by Mercer, according to Bloomberg News. Amid questions that there was a quid-pro-quo arrangement – as posse members, Mercer and the others could qualify for nationwide concealed-carry privileges if Day allowed it – but the sheriff has denied any link, angrily denouncing the media attention as “fake news.”
Day has said in published reports that some of his posse members do undercover work for him, infiltrating drug cartels. He has refused to name the members of the volunteer posse. He told The Denver Post in an email that he was seeking clarification from his attorney on the contradicting statutes on a sheriff’s authority to appoint posse members.
Auxiliary police are critical pieces to law enforcement agencies, particularly when there’s a rush of people to an area, such as Frozen Dead Guy Days in Nederland, or emergencies such as the floods that isolated the Town of Milliken in 2013.
Occasionally they have also met with some trouble across the country. A volunteer officer traveling with an on-duty officer in Florence, S.C., in March shot a motorist eight times during a traffic stop; a volunteer sheriff’s deputy in Tulsa, Okla., in 2015 killed an unarmed suspect, mistaking his own firearm for a stun gun.
“They go out on patrol, assist with search-and-rescue, assist in natural disasters of flood and wildfire to evacuate, control access point, form perimeters on crime scenes,” Johnson said. “They can do anything a full-time officer can do, but they have to be under the direction of a full-time peace officer to do it.”
That’s why the Colorado legislature last year passed Senate Bill 17-96 that funded the Rangers, formally establishing it as a police auxiliary program that any community could tap into. With more than 200 certified officers to choose from by the end of 2019, the idea is a fresh one.
Senate Bill 17-96 appropriated $800,000 from the marijuana tax cash fund for the creation and running of the reserve training academy through the Colorado Department of Public Safety. Another $14,000 was appropriated to pay for administrative expenses.
Rangers are properly called the Colorado Rangers Law Enforcement Shared Reserve but use CLER as their operative acronym. “We are a no-cost solution when so many resources are stretched,” CLER Chief Ronald Abramson said.
The officers come from a broad cross-section of the community, from airline pilots to bankers, from investment brokers to former military police. They still donate their time and work for little more than acknowledgement.
Because the group requires its members to attend a special reserve academy that gives them certification from the Colorado Police Officer Standards and Training (POST), it ensures anyone with the badge knows what they’re doing.
“More than 50 percent of peace officers in Colorado are not POST certified,” said Bill Tolbert, the Rangers’ second in command, noting that includes officers such as bailiffs, RTD police, park rangers and corrections officers. “It was a misconception that all were certified and trained.”
It’s unclear just how many reserve officers work in the state since sheriffs can add someone to a posse without the need for certification. That’s why the Rangers pressed for funding, to ensure they can offer reserves to any community and guarantee they have completed a special state reserve academy.
Abramson said reserve officers of all law enforcement agencies have the right under a federal law that allows peace officers to carry concealed weapons anywhere in the nation, but only if the agency where they volunteer allows it.
The Rangers, by rule, cannot, he said.
“We don’t allow it for our agency,” Abramson said, noting the Rangers must acquire their own concealed-weapon permit and, when traveling, can only rely on that.
“They cannot use their Rangers badge off-duty,” he said. “We’re very cautious.”
Said Tolbert: “We don’t need cowboys.”
The former Colorado Mounted Rangers – around since 1861, they chose to change the name in part because of the frequency of the question: “So where’s your horse?” – worked with 58 law enforcement agencies. Though Rangers were formed through the intergovernmental agreement of seven communities – Monument, Idaho Springs, Fort Lupton, Fountain, Nederland, Elizabeth and Dillon – the organization is expected to extend beyond those 58.
People are sometimes surprised to learn that there are volunteer officers who work without pay, Carroll said.
“Most of us live along the Front Range with large police departments, so we don’t expect it,” he said. “But those agencies that use the Rangers are frequently in smaller areas that don’t have a lot of access to trained people or the budgets to pay the enormous overtime.”
Under his command in Otero County, Johnson said the 18 volunteer deputies he brought on to help looked every bit like paid deputies. And every one of them carried state certification.
“They had a badge, the same uniform, but they wore a reserve pin to identify them,” Johnson said.
And none was allowed to carry a weapon on duty unless under the supervision of a full-time deputy.
“If they wanted to carry off-duty, they needed to have the permit like all other citizens,” Johnson said.
Source : Denver Post
