The resignation of Alamosa Police Chief Ken Anderson and his public beef with City Manager Heather Sanchez raised a host of questions for the community and the city council it elects to manage affairs. The foremost being: Is Alamosa a safe community and does the city spend enough to protect its citizens?
Anderson resigned on Wednesday in a dramatic display, handing over his badge before saluting the mayor and then turning and walking out of the City Council chambers. His next stop looks to be the Alamosa County Sheriff’s Office while the city of Alamosa tries to focus a search on its next police chief.
What the crime statistics show:
Alamosa has been going through a rising volume of property crime and violent crime over the past six years, according to crime data reported to the Colorado Department of Public Safety, which maintains a searchable Colorado Crime Statistics database. A review of it showed 84 property crimes in 2015 that jumped to then 601 by 2017, tapering back to 383 cases in 2021 and then 515 reported property crimes in 2022.
Property crimes, consisting largely of theft of another person’s property, is by far the most prevalent type of crime in the city of Alamosa. When thinking of the crime, consider also the opioid epidemic that ravaged the nation and had Alamosa itself in the center of the storm.
For proof of that, there is The Washington Post map that gave a county-level analysis of where the most oxycodone and hydrocodone pills were distributed across the country and the mind-boggling figures that showed Alamosa among the most doped-up places in the nation with an average of 77.3 pills per person that were distributed every year from 2006 to 2019.
Violent crime has also jumped in cases, from 9 reported in 2015 to 55 in 2017 and then up to 84 in 2020, 86 in 2021 and 84 reported in 2022. Motor vehicle theft is another category up, going from 3 in 2015 to 45 in 2020, 33 in 2021 and back up to 40 car thefts in 2022.
Murder was a rarity in Alamosa, with none reported from 2015 through 2018, and then a single murder in 2019. Since then Alamosa has logged 10 more murder cases through 2022.
All in all, crime has been a rising problem. What are the correlating and underlying factors? That’s where the experts come in, but the level of opioid distribution and drug addiction has to be considered.
Alamosa also grew its population 12 percent between decades – 2010 to 2020 – and state demographer forecasts show the city continuing to gain a bit in population into 2030. Census estimates put the city of Alamosa’s population at 9,845 in 2022.
The 2023 crime statistics are not complete but the trend during the course of the year shows a falling level of crime in all the categories. Without a full year of data, however, a historical comparison cannot yet be made.
The overall police budget during Anderson’s time as police chief grew 70 percent, or up to $4.3 million in total for 2023.
A trendline on the city’s police budget:
Rising crime would suggest the need to grow the police budget, and indeed that is the case. Alamosa is spending more on police than ever before, up in actual police officers and support staff, according to the city’s employee records, and up overall in annual budget appropriations year after year.
In 2017, a year before Anderson became police chief, Alamosa had an annual police budget of $1.8 million for police operations, with another $374,000 for support services, $137,000 for capital improvements and $211,810 in police administration expenses.
In 2023, as crime rose, Alamosa’s police budget sat at $3.1 million for police operations or up 72 percent in the five years Anderson was police chief. Rising higher was support services expenses going to $745,480 in the 2023 budget compared to $374,350 in 2017, a growth of 99 percent.
The police department has added seven new employees since 2017 to give it a total staff of 35. The overall police budget during Anderson’s time as police chief grew 70 percent, or up to $4.3 million in total for 2023.
How Alamosa compares to other municipalities:
Alamosa logs among the highest crime rates for a town with its population in Colorado. Delta, Glenwood Springs, Rifle, Lamar, La Junta, Trinidad, Cortez – all comparable in population – aren’t close to the levels of property crime and violent crime that Alamosa shows, particularly since 2017.
Glenwood Springs for example, with a population of 10,000, recorded 318 property crimes in 2022 compared to 515 in Alamosa. Cortez, meanwhile, logged 215 property crimes in 2022 and Cañon City, with 7,000 more residents than Alamosa, totaled 425 property crimes compared to Alamosa’s 515 property crimes.
Violent crime in Canon City is higher than Alamosa, according to the crime stats, but communities closer in size to Alamosa all run below Alamosa’s totals. Trinidad runs closest to Alamosa in violent crime, logging 71 cases in 2022 compared to 84 in Alamosa. Glenwood Springs and Delta, closest to Alamosa in population, recorded 42 and 15 violent crime cases in 2022, respectively.
The biggest question becomes, why is that? And what type of law enforcement strategy should Alamosa deploy to reverse the trends?
What’s next:
Most of the conversation among city council members on how to address the resignation of Anderson and his public fallout with the city manager will begin behind closed doors in executive session. The city council has scheduled meetings where it will go into closed session to begin hashing out its differences and how to move forward beginning with Nov. 15 city council meeting.
Council members signaled when Anderson shocked them and handed in his badge during last Wednesday’s city council meeting that they had a lot to hash out, first among themselves. Under Colorado Open Meetings law, the city council can go into an executive session to discuss a personnel matter but it cannot take any action or consider any action while in executive session. Closed sessions among elected officials are to receive information and to discuss the information received.
Some city council members are signaling an intention to hold a discussion centered around City Manager Heather Sanchez and whether she should remain. She already has outlined a process for the city council to interview each department head of the city in response to Anderson’s accusation of her “tyrant leadership.” Her future, however, is among the decisions the city council will now also determine after hearing from community members calling for her resignation following Anderson’s dramatic departure.
Mayor Ty Coleman is pleading for calm through his Facebook page. It’s on Facebook that city officials get their largest amount of commentary and with the Anderson resignation, Sanchez has become the top villain for Facebook Alamosa.
Sanchez, herself, is intent on following through on a search for the next Alamosa police chief and naming a committee to conduct the search. Her initial instinct was to have Anderson as part of the committee but her feeling now that Anderson has “burned bridges” makes that doubtful.
In Alamosa’s strong city manager form of government, where the city manager is charged with running the city’s day-to-day operations and has a level of senior leaders like the police chief who report to the position, Sanchez in her 10 years of running Alamosa has been able to count on a majority of city council members backing her and the strategies she saw to pursue.
But a public feud with the police chief is a different kind of personnel problem for a city manager, and in this case with a changing makeup of city council coming up as a result of next Tuesday’s municipal election, it’s unclear whether Sanchez will retain the majority of support that’s been there for her in the past.
But then if you’re the city council, a part-0time body elected to oversee the appointment of the city manager, can you afford to lose an experienced city manager and a police chief at the same time?