Happy New Year, Boulder!

I hope that your holidays were filled with peace, joy, and time with loved ones. As we begin a new year, and at least a month of still writing “2025”, I hope that you are as eager as I am to see what 2026 has in store for us.

As we continue to live in turbulent times, it is even more important for us to put our differences aside and work together to ensure Boulder is the best and safest place to live, work, and play. Our goal for 2026 is to build on the work we accomplished in 2025.

I want to share a special thank you to our staff and our public safety partners for the extraordinary work during the December Public Safety Power Shutoff by Xcel. As we saw unprecedented conditions that were ripe for an extreme fire event, our teams jumped into action to ensure that we were ready should the worst come to Boulder. To enhance safety, I moved our officers from their standard 10-hour shift to 12-hour shifts and limited any time off right before Christmas.

Our dispatchers were flooded with 911 calls, and we sent people to the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) to assist with its activation.

Our patrol officers responded to hundreds of calls to assist the community, and overall, we came out of the several-day ordeal with very few major incidents. I commend our partners with Boulder Fire-Rescue for their work to quickly stop several fires that occurred. All in all, despite the wind damage, and issues caused by the power outage, we avoided catastrophe. Thanks to everyone who stepped in to help us get through that long week.

Chief Redfearn speaks to officers during a special briefing before the public safety power shutoff.

In December, I shared some of the Boulder Police Department’s successes and proud moments from 2025, and I am happy to share that we did indeed finish 2025 with significant reductions in nearly every crime category compared to the prior year.

We are eager to hear from you about what needs you have, and how we can help to make 2026 safer for everyone here in Boulder.

For 2026, our team already has several goals. Of course, we never know what unplanned things will happen, but overall, I want to share some of our main goals for the year.

You will also find that these goals align with our strategic Reimagine Policing plan.

Boulder Police Department 2026 goals.

For 2026, our main department goals are:

1. Safety – Continue to reduce crime citywide and focus our efforts through our Problem-Oriented Policing initiative to reduce calls for service at high-call and high-crime locations.

2. Recruiting and Retention – Continue to hire quality employees to fill vacant roles and work hard to retain the talented employees we currently have.

3. Community Engagement – Continue to be present, visible, and engaged in our community, and work to add additional staff to our liaison roles, hold town halls with the chief and other staff, and be present at community events and meetings.

4. Staff Wellness – Continue to prioritize the well-being of our employees who face stressors and trauma that most people never do. A top priority is ensuring our employees come to work emotionally and physically well.

5. Transparency – Continue to share with the community what we do and why we do it. As we add new technology, tools, or programs, we want to share the ins and outs of those things via our dashboards and other formats.

6. Sundance Preparation – With a year to go until we host the first Sundance Film Festival in Boulder, much of the year will be spent preparing for January 2027 when we host Sundance in the city. This involves training, advances in technology, and ensuring we are engaged in best practices so we can hold a safe and fun festival.

There are many other things we will be looking at, and as trends, safety, the national landscape, and unplanned incidents evolve, we will constantly re-evaluate these priorities to make sure we are focusing on where we need to be.

One thing that I will be starting in 2026 are regular town-hall style meetings between myself and other department members and you, our community. We are consistently asked for information about what’s going on with policing in Boulder, and I want to bring back a format for our community to ask questions and hear directly from me and my team about issues that we’re facing in Boulder.

Chief Redfearn’s first town hall of 2026 will be held at Cornerstone Church at 1190 S. Lashley Lane in South Boulder.

Our tentative plan for these town halls is below and we will share more details in next month’s newsletter:

South Boulder, Wednesday, Jan. 28. 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Cornerstone Church, 1190 S Lashley Lane.

Downtown. Wednesday, April 22. 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.

East Boulder. Wednesday, July 22. 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.

North Boulder. Thursday, Oct. 8. 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.

Regarding our town halls, one favor I ask of you is to let us know what kinds of topics you would like us to talk about. This includes speakers you may also want to hear from aside from me. You will find a link here to a form where you can let us know your ideas for these meetings.

As a reminder, many topics of interest to our community are discussed and reported out on our public dashboards on our website. For example, there have been a lot of recent conversations about our use of drones, license plate readers, and other technology and crime trends that are discussed on our website.

I am so excited about where our agency and our city is headed in 2026. We have new initiatives, new employees (including another 4-legged one), and we are better staffed and better equipped to handle whatever comes our way. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: we can’t do any of the work without the support of our community, and we want to hear from you about how we can better serve Boulder.

My email is redfearns@bouldercolorado.gov
Please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Steve Redfearn, police chief