Alamosa is consistent in its number of traffic citations. In fact, Police Chief George Dingfelder will tell you that Alamosa yields more traffic violations in a year than the rest of the San Luis Valley combined, relying on his experience with Colorado State Patrol to make the assertion.
Here is what three years of traffic citations looks like in the city limits. The data comes from Alamosa PD through a Colorado Open Records request filed by Alamosa Citizen. When the police chief talked on The Valley Pod about the time-consuming nature around the volume of traffic calls Alamosa responds to, the Citizen requested traffic citation data for the years 2023, 2024 and 2025, including which traffic stops involved speeding and which ones evolved into suspicion of narcotics in the vehicle.
Alamosa PD is deploying a new strategy this year to free its officers from the more mundane reporting of minor traffic citations in order to focus in other areas like enforcement of speed limits. The plan calls for motorists to police themselves, at times, when a traffic situation occurs on private property and can be handled without a responding police officer completing a report.
Private property like, say, the parking lot of Walmart, where a lot of the citations do happen, according to the data.
“One of the things that we still are doing, but we’re going to go away from is private property crashes,” Dingfelder said in a December episode of The Valley Pod. He later added, “I’ll use Walmart, Safeway, City Market, any of them. Me and you are backing out, we back into each other. We can just exchange information and then give that information to our insurance company. That means because again, it’s not a mandated report, but what we are going to do, we’re going to do away with doing the actual report. We’re still going to respond to those. We’re going to make sure that nobody’s been drinking because there are some criteria even if it occurs on private property.”
BECOME A MEMBER: Our local reporting is possible only through the support of our members.
Two months into 2026, Dingfelder confirmed the strategy and Alamosa’s effort to address the speeding problem through town.
“We can spend our time doing more productive things than being reporters for insurance companies,” Dingfelder said in an interview this week.
The data:
- Alamosa police logged 342 traffic accidents in 2023; 337 in 2024; and 332 accidents in 2025. Of those citations over the past three years, 27 percent ticketed were without car insurance compared to Colorado’s uninsured motorist rate estimated at 17.5 percent.
- The roads around Walmart, specifically 3333 Clark St., see the most traffic accidents. Another busy area for violations is the 1300 Block of Main Street around Safeway, and the 100 Block of Craft Street around McDonald’s.
- Narcotics were suspected in 38 of the 342 accidents in 2023; 68 of the 337 accidents in 2024; and 49 of the 332 accidents logged in 2025.
- Speeding through Alamosa resulted in 893 citations over the past three years. Alamosa PD issued 238 speeding violations in 2023, 279 in 2024, and a whooping 376 speeding tickets in 2025.
Alamosa PD is going further in its efforts to crack down on speeders by identifying key zones through town to patrol and possibly install automatic cameras to help slow down motorists.
In a seven-day period at the end of October and into November of 2025, Alamosa PD conducted a study on the 700 Block of Sixth Street. In that week, police flagged 850 cars traveling 10 miles or more over the speed limit.
In February of this year Alamosa PD returned to the same location, the 700 Block of Sixth Street near the Alamosa Farmer’s Market summer location, to conduct a second traffic study. This time over a seven-day stretch, Alamosa PD flagged 1,300 motorists traveling 10 miles or more over the 25 MPH zone.
State Avenue south of the railroad tracks is another area for speeding that Alamosa PD is focused on, again because of a study it did that showed 1,000 vehicles over a 7-day period exceeding the posted speed limit.
“My goal,” said Dingfelder, “is we don’t issue a single spending ticket or a single careless driving ticket. That would be the goal that we would want to accomplish.”
For that, Alamosa PD will need assistance from motorists themselves.