Monument's Police Department

An Update to 2021's Referendum to Fund our Police

Hi All,

It’s been a hot minute since I last wrote to you you with any level of regularity and focus and well I’m not really going to apologize for that since I am on path to finish my second Master’s Degree in the coming months in Cybersecurity :) :)

I broke away from my focus of professional growth this evening to attend Monument’s Town Council meeting and I got to witness a couple of things in rapid succession that finally closed the 2021 elections for myself.

But first, let’s go back to 2020 and find out how we got to the 2021 elections. Back in early 2020, a good friend of mine began talking to me about some efforts he was leading with the Town of Monument. He talked about modernizing our police force and bringing them into compliance. Back then, I was focused on some personal initiatives and wasn’t able to devote any cycles to his effort. A ballot initiative had made it on to the ballot to fund the police and that initiative failed miserably after a group of people had over-run the discussion on social media. What quickly became apparent was that the vast majority of these people did not live within Monument.

Flash forward a few months, and I had returned to Colorado after a brief stint back in Texas to tend to some family affairs and I got contacted by the Mayor and the brand new Chief of Police. They wanted to talk about re-starting the failed initiative and wanted some help articulating their positions and why this was so important.

After a few messages back and forth with the Chief, some coffees with a few different people, messages with the town staff, the situation became very clear, very quickly how dire the situation was with our town Police Department. I researched the problem and quickly came up with a plan on how to attack the communication strategy on Social Media.

I attacked the problem with facts and began posting threads in different Facebook groups and on NextDoor. I laid out why voting for a simple mil-levy wouldn’t work and why we needed officers. In 2021, we had 16 officers, two of which were the Chief and one Commander. We had single officers on duty at night with no supervisor on duty. For a town of 10k residents we should have 24 officers in our department based on 2.4 officers per 1k residents for towns over 10k residents.

After bickering with some residents and even more people in the County who couldn’t stomach the idea of Monument Residents self governing their destiny, the voting day finally came and went. In the dust, the measure 2F passed with flying colors by a margin of 70-30.

Tonight, I was privy to the promotion of two officers to Sergeant and the Oath of Office being given to Monument’s 27th Officer (today’s population: 11,000; 2.4 x 11 = 26.4) … we are truly blessed to have a fully funded police force and the pride and joy of every town in our vicinity. Monument truly has a professional police force once again. 2F has succeeded in ways well beyond my own imagination and I have every single one of you to thank for it. You voted for a secure society and our police are here to ensure it for you. Thank You Monument.

v/r

-Ryan