Prepared remarks: Attorney General Phil Weiser to County Sheriffs of Colorado CSOC Winter Conference (Jan. 23, 2025)
I am honored to be joining you again this year, and I look forward to continuing to work with all of you to advance public safety, protect victims, and improve the lives of Coloradans. Today, I’d like to take the opportunity to discuss some of our work in the Attorney General’s office and how we can continue to work together on several key areas of focus in law enforcement. I would also like to provide an update on our POST law enforcement academy curriculum redesign initiative.
Before diving in, I also want to take a moment to recognize that we celebrated Law Enforcement Appreciation Day earlier this month on January 9th and extend to all of you our appreciation for your service to our communities. Thank you for your exemplary service and dedication to keeping our communities safe.
I. Law Enforcement Policy Priorities
A. Medications for Opioid Use Disorder
There are several timely policy priorities and opportunities in the law enforcement field that I would like to highlight today. First, it is critical that Colorado, with the continued collaboration of all the leaders in the room today, expand the availability of medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) in our jails and provide continuity of care upon release. I know you all are very aware of the challenges that inmates face when it comes to substance use disorder, and many of you have already seen the benefits of these programs in action. This type of treatment can help prevent deaths during incarceration and facilitate recovery and safe re-entry into society, including by reducing the greatly elevated risk of overdose after a period of incarceration. These benefits extend well beyond those directly affected and contribute to healthier and more vibrant communities for us all. At the state level, we have worked to make funds available for medication addiction treatment, and we are pursuing a federal waiver so Medicaid can pay for such treatment.
I am proud to say that, ahead of our 2024 Colorado Opioid Abatement Council Conference, 20 county jails in Colorado were nominated for recognition by jail staff, sheriffs, community members, and formerly incarcerated persons for their outstanding work in providing MOUD and post-release care. Of these nominees, our office awarded $50,000 to sheriff’s offices in Summit, Moffat, Morgan, Pueblo, and Arapahoe counties. Thank you for your leadership on this front and serving as a model for how we can combat the opioid crisis in Colorado’s jails.
B. VINE Notification
The next priority I would like to highlight is an important innovation for protecting victims of domestic violence. I chair the Colorado Domestic Violence Fatality Review Board, which has the heavy task of identifying and reviewing all domestic violence related deaths in Colorado each year. As part of this work, the Board makes recommendations to improve our laws and works together to implement those recommendations. This year, the Board recommended that the state expand the functionality of the VINE system to ensure that victims are notified if the restrained party seeks to purchase a gun. Last year, 365 people subject to a restraining order tried to purchase a firearm. The painful reality is that many of the protected parties were not aware of these attempts. This is particularly concerning for domestic violence victims because victims whose abusers have access to a firearm are six times more likely to be murdered than victims whose abusers do not own firearms. Notifying victims about attempted firearm purchases will allow them to have important information for their safety and planning.
The Board also recommended that VINE be used to notify victims when their protection order is served and when it is due to expire. This is also critical because when a perpetrator is put on notice that a protection order is in place, this is often a high-risk time for a victim. Consider, for example, that 25% of the 2023 domestic violence fatality cases had an active protection order at the time of the fatality.
We will continue to partner with CSOC in working on legislation this session to expand the functionality of VINE as the Board recommends. As with other states policies, like the one requiring law enforcement officers to wear body-worn cameras, I will work hard to ensure that you are not saddled with unfunded mandates. That’s true for this recommended policy as well. I encourage you all to follow this legislation and provide feedback in the process.
C. Investment in Law Enforcement Recruitment, Training, and Retention
As a final note on policy priorities, I would be remiss not to mention the opportunity for a major investment in law enforcement following last year’s election. During that election, voters approved Proposition 130, which directed the General Assembly to allocate $350 million in funding to recruit, train, and retain law enforcement officers. This funding provides a welcome opportunity to invest in new team members for your agencies, helping keep them on the force, and ensuring they have new financial resources for training. It will be important to make the most of this funding and deploy it smartly so that it can pay dividends for the safety of our communities for years to come and to support the important work that you do. Our office stands ready to assist the legislature and your offices in this effort.
II. Law Enforcement Academy Curriculum Redesign
On the subject of investing in law enforcement training, we are working hard to develop a redesigned curriculum that will become a standard model for our state. As I have discussed previously, our office has been engaged in an ambitious multi-year effort to revise the core Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) law enforcement academy curriculum. As you know, under our current model, each academy is required to create its own curriculum—a process that takes a tremendous amount of time and resources and has resulted in inconsistent training across the state. Under the new model, all academies will need to do is certify that they are teaching from the standard model—or get approval to make relevant changes. And just as is the case under the current model, academies are free to add additional content.
To develop the new model curriculum, we started by completing a Job Analysis. We worked with a nationally recognized company who conducts these analyses for all sorts of industries—including law enforcement. They identified the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics a peace officer needs to be successful in their job. The company we worked with travelled across the state meeting with peace officers, joining in ride-alongs, and conducting detailed surveys to fully document these tasks. They then organized these tasks into broad themes, completing this work in 2022.
With experts from around the state, we worked to identify the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics from the Job Analysis that needed to be taught at an academy level and which were more appropriate to learn in field training, on the job, and in ongoing in-service training. We then worked to identify 10 key mindsets, which range and include everything from effective communication to reducing, preventing, and managing behaviors associated with conflict. I have outlined these mindsets previously and please review my speech on this topic if helpful.
Using these tasks, the 10 Key Mindsets, the current POST curriculum, and other available law enforcement curriculum models, the POST staff worked with subject matter experts to create Intended Learning Outcomes, or ILOs. ILOs describe what cadets should be able to do and know, along with the level of understanding of that topic that is needed to be successful. Take arrest control, for example. In that case, the ILO for that topic would contain the “hard skills” needed to execute the physical tasks when warranted, but also would include the corresponding “soft skills,” such as those needed to de-escalate a heated situation like emotional awareness and communication.
Going forward, we will be developing the necessary Teaching and Learning Materials for these ILOs that reflect best-practices in adult learning. These materials will, for example, de-emphasize class lectures—the “sage on a stage model”—and focus more on active learning, such as teaching and learning through scenarios and case studies. As is well appreciated in the education field, these teaching methodologies increase learning and retention. By mimicking real life situations in the classroom and hands-on training, cadets will improve their skills, including critical thinking. Moreover, this approach to training introduces cadets to situations and emotions they will experience in the field, allowing them to practice making good decisions in a controlled environment. As such, it will allow them to be more confident in making the right decisions in chaotic environments.
Rather than presenting all of the relevant concepts for a given topic at once, like how is done in our current modular-type “one and done” academy, the critical concepts will be integrated throughout the entire curriculum for better understanding and critical thinking. Take, for example, the Fourth Amendment. Rather than simply having one Fourth Amendment module, search and seizure concepts would be taught during courses on pedestrian contacts, traffic stops, domestic violence, and suspicious persons, highlighting how cadets would apply their knowledge of search and seizure while participating in problem-based learning during these courses. Because we will “thread” concepts like search and seizure throughout the curriculum, we are calling the large buckets of topics that need to be taught to cadets “Threads.” In short, at the end of this project, each academy will have an integrated and organized set of “threaded” materials that will ensure cadets have been taught all of the ILOs and are prepared effectively to serve their communities in law enforcement.
To develop this state-of-the-art and modernized curriculum, we need your help. Notably, we are building a Curriculum Development Team (CDT) and welcome your suggestions on leaders in our field who can help. The CDT will be composed of subject matter experts, frontline staff and supervisors, training officers, command staff, and others. In order to optimize the success of this project, we need the perspectives of agencies of all sizes and from every corner of our great state to cover the topics that need to be taught at an academy.
In terms of how the process will work, the larger CDT will be broken up into smaller Task Groups that will create the relevant content for specific Threads. Those Task Groups will be organized by expertise. To help this process along, and to help reduce an already overwhelming amount of work that needs to be accomplished, POST will rely on relevant content ideas from our newly created Resource Library. This Library will come from you and other leaders in the profession, who shared exemplary materials from academies across the state. If you are connected to an academy, please encourage them to work with Gwen Burke to make sure their content is included in this Resource Library. We are lucky to have Gwen overseeing this ambitious project. She used to lead the Front Range Community College Law Enforcement Academy and is now serving as the Lead Curriculum Developer for this project. We encourage all of you to reach out and connect with Gwen to learn more about the project and how you can work with us in the next phase.
After years of groundwork, our curriculum redesign process is at a crucial stage, as we are now building the CDT. We invite all of you and all of your staff to sign up to serve on this critical team. Thanks for your help in advancing this important work, whether by volunteering yourself, nominating others, and sharing valuable curriculum materials that we can use for the standardized model. On these fronts, Bo is here and available to follow up.
For those interested and able to join us at our upcoming inaugural POST Conference on March 12 and 13 in Fort Collins, it will be a valuable opportunity to dive deeper into POST procedures, best practices, and other key law enforcement topics. We hope you can join us, and you can find the link to register on the POST website.
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We are living at a time when it is critical to do more to support and invest in law enforcement. Many of you are working with law enforcement teams that are understaffed, seeking to train up newer officers, and stay on top of a range of challenges that make this work harder. Too often, you are not thanked for your leadership and not consulted as critical issues facing the profession are being made. I appreciate your service and your leadership. And I always want your input as our state works to improve public safety.