A suspicion of Big Data.

In the House, one of the Capitol’s most progressive members, Rep. Jennifer Bacon, is partnering with one of the building’s most conservative voices, Rep. Ken DeGraaf, on a bill that would block law enforcement from buying Coloradans’ private data.

In the Senate, a Democratic criminal justice reformer, Sen. Judy Amabile, and a Republican newcomer, Sen. Lynda Zamora Wilson, are joining to back legislation that would limit law enforcement’s access to databases of information fed by license plate-reading cameras.

The fundamental tension between security and privacy that has animated American policymakers since the country’s founding is ratcheting up this year, as mass data collection and surveillance technology become ubiquitous.

Zamora Wilson began a committee hearing last week by quoting Benjamin Franklin’s line about how giving up essential liberty for temporary safety makes one deserving of neither. Centuries later, lawmakers say they’re responding to the same sense of unease that’s spread from Super Bowl commercials and the activities of local technology giants. In Colorado, legislators have already moved to limit access to biometric data, and other bills this year deal with data for tenants, homeowners, social media users and immigrants.

Colorado is not alone. Montana passed its own law last year limiting law enforcement’s access to private data purchasing. Other states have increasingly weighed how to shield their residents from the consequences of invisible but ever-growing mountains of information amassed by smartphone apps, traffic cameras and nosy household appliances.

In Denver, Mayor Mike Johnston last week announced an imminent end to the city’s controversial relationship with Flock Safety, which has run its license plate cameras.

“Right now, law enforcement has body cameras, cameras on their cars, pole cameras, speeding cameras, red light, license-plate readers, facial recognition, drones — and then we have (artificial intelligence) coming on board, which is a big unknown,” said Zamora Wilson, who lives at the Air Force Academy. “And a lot of my constituents are concerned that their privacy is being invaded, and we’re becoming a surveillance state, like China.”

Or, as Bacon quipped during a committee hearing Wednesday for her bill with DeGraaf: “When this crazy liberal from Denver and this libertarian from El Paso County sit in front of you, that means there is a legitimate community concern.”

Besides the license plate cameras, Zamora Wilson is sponsoring bills that would regulate traffic cameras, facial recognition software and drones.

Not all of the privacy-centered bills are focused on law enforcement, and not all are bipartisan. Democrats are also running legislation aimed at preventing companies from using mass data collection to customize prices for online shoppers and individualize wages for gig workers like Uber drivers. (Though that bill may have some crossover appeal, too: DeGraaf said he was “concerned” about the practice.)

But even bipartisan agreement does not necessarily translate to clear paths through the legislature.

Law enforcement is flatly opposed to the bills that would limit agencies’ access to data. During committee testimony last week, in between panelists who warned about mass data collection, police chiefs and detectives described the shootings, murders and assaults they’d solved with license plate readers and location data.

Requiring them to obtain warrants before they could access that data, they warned, would hinder their ability to solve those crimes in the future.

“The legislation, I think, is trying to be responsive to what (lawmakers are) hearing from some people,” said Todd Reeves, a deputy police chief speaking on behalf of the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police. “Unfortunately, I don’t think they know exactly how we use this data and how we use this information and how cases are put together.”

Law enforcement opposition can be a serious hurdle in the Capitol. Uniforms filling committee rooms and legislative lobbies — and officers describing violent crimes and the technology needed to solve them — can override higher-level discussions about the implications of that technology.

Only one of the three measures up for an initial vote last week cleared its first hurdle. Lawmakers delayed votes on the other two so that they could work to shore up support and assuage concerns from police and prosecutors.

Police surveillance: ‘People are concerned’

A week ago, Chrisanna Elser described to lawmakers the “dystopian task” of proving her innocence against license plate readers.

The technology had captured her truck in an area where a package had been reported stolen, and a Columbine Valley Police officer told her: “You can’t get a breath of fresh air in our valley or town without us knowing.”

Elser eventually gathered her own evidence to prove she wasn’t the package thief, according to 9News, which previously covered the incident.

“I am here to testify that this technology is being sold as a shield to protect communities,” Elser told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Feb. 23, as they debated Zamora Wilson and Amabile’s bill. “But in practice, it is a digital dragnet that turns our constitutional rights upside down.”

Senate Bill 70 would generally prohibit law enforcement or government agencies from accessing databases gathered by license plate readers without a warrant. It would waive the requirement in certain situations, such as emergencies or within a short time window after specific data was gathered. The bill would also limit how long that data could be stored, though Zamora Wilson and Amabile eased that provision last week.

Two days later, Bacon and DeGraaf settled in for the first committee hearing on House Bill 1037. Their bill would generally prevent local law enforcement from buying Coloradans’ personal data from private companies — such as location information that can be accurate to within a few inches, said Sebastian Zimmeck, a computer science professor at Wesleyan University who researches data privacy.

Bacon, DeGraaf and their supporters argue their proposal is in keeping with the Fourth Amendment, which generally requires law enforcement get a warrant before obtaining a person’s private information. Montana passed a similar law last year.

While law enforcement officials argued that the bills would hamper their ability to do their jobs, supporters of the proposals said that was the point: ensuring there are checks on the government’s access to Coloradans’ information.

The nation’s founders wrote that citizens had a right to be secure in their papers. DeGraaf said the modern equivalent was security in data. Like Zamora Wilson, he said the specter of China’s omnipresent surveillance state loomed large.

“What this bill is about is, what are the expectations that we have — as people, as neighbors, as constituents — about what we do and do not want people to have access to,” Bacon said. “And in this case, just for this bill, how can that information be used against me in a court of law? Or rather, if we wanted the government to know it, shouldn’t we have given it to them?”

Each of the bills received hours of seesawing testimony from police and civil liberties groups, district attorneys and libertarians.

Unique coalitions formed: One panel of supporters for HB-1037 included a prominent gun-rights group, a leading immigration advocacy organization, a religious alliance and a Boulder resident who regularly testifies against Democratic proposals.

All shared similar concerns about the government buying their information.

Zamora Wilson was adamant about her support for law enforcement. She called state efforts to regulate the usage of data a “delicate dance” of protecting privacy and civil liberties, while giving law enforcement the tools to solve crimes quickly and efficiently.

“It’s here. It’s not just coming down the pipe — it’s here,” Zamora Wilson said. “And people are concerned. And so we need to have the discussion. What does this look like? What do the guardrails look like? Where’s the give and take?”

‘Not about bypassing warrants,’ sergeant says

Prosecutors and police officials argued that the give-and-take would mean compromising their ability to quickly respond to and solve crimes.

License plate readers, location data — that information, they say, helps police turn fragments of information into search warrants.

“This is not about bypassing warrants. It’s about preserving the investigative path that allows us to identify suspects before seeking judicial authorization,” Sgt. Dominic Marziano of the Aurora Police Department told lawmakers during the debate over Bacon and DeGraaf’s bill. “Privacy and technology should advance together, but we must avoid recreating barriers that past tragedies taught us to remove.”

For every American Civil Liberties Union official arguing that obtaining private information about Americans shouldn’t be quick or easy, an officer detailed a shooting solved by quick access to location data.

Elser, who fought the package theft accusation, was caught in an impersonal — and inaccurate — technology dragnet. Shortly after she described it, Aurora resident Ramon Farfan told lawmakers that his brother’s murder was solved with the help of license plate reader technology.

Prosecutors debated lawmakers on the limits of the Fourth Amendment. While advocates and lawmakers point to the rapidly changing and expanding technology as a reason to act now, Reeves, from the police chiefs association, said the concept wasn’t new.

Automated license plate readers, for example, have been in use for more than 20 years in Colorado, he said in an interview. Body-worn cameras used by police officers often capture people’s most intimate and vulnerable moments, including on private property.

And other more invasive technologies, like infrared cameras, have been discarded voluntarily by chiefs concerned about the invasion of privacy, he said — proof that law enforcement already weighs community wants and expectations.

Advocates are pushing a “false narrative of state surveillance,” Reeves said. The technology being targeted by Colorado lawmakers focuses on public areas not covered by the Fourth Amendment. Plus, he said, the system’s actual footprint is too scant to constitute mass surveillance, he said.

These systems aren’t used for general surveillance and couldn’t be, Reeves said. Instead, they are entry points for deeper investigations, including how law enforcement can target warrants.

He also worries the proposed bills would be too rigid and too narrowly focused, and they would have the effect of hamstringing law enforcement as new technologies emerge. Even if the bills become law, he noted, the data about people will still be out there.

Instead, Reeves said he’d like the conversation to focus on internal policies used by law enforcement agencies and how to strike the balance between public safety and privacy that way, versus passing rigid legislation.

“The concepts are flawed from the beginning,” Reeves said. “Do I think we could work together and come up with palatable, acceptable legislation that’s not so restrictive and doesn’t overprovide protections of the Fourth Amendment that are clearly established? Yes. But I think that’s going to take an incredible amount of dialogue and an incredible amount of patience, because we both need to understand each others’ responsibilities.”

If the bills build upon decades of debates over privacy and security, their hearings last week showed how unsettled that balance remains.

Only SB-70, the license plate reader bill, passed its committee vote. After hours of testimony, Bacon and DeGraaf delayed HB-1037’s first vote amid skepticism over the data-purchasing bill from some Democrats and the House Judiciary Committee’s four Republicans (one of whom was a late substitute).

Zamora Wilson similarly paused the vote on her broader bill that’s aimed at facial recognition and traffic cameras, as she sought to shore up support.

“I think there’s this view that we are somehow trying to harm law enforcement and restrict their ability to do their jobs and protect people,” Anaya Robinson of the ACLU of Colorado said in an interview. “In reality, none of the bills are about that. The bills are about protecting people and protecting privacy, which we should all hold very dear.”

Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.

Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured during a military strike on Venezuela early Saturday and taken out of the country. American officials say the couple will face “narco-terrorism charges” in U.S. courts.

President Donald Trump on Saturday said the U.S. is “going to run” Venezuela until a transition of power can occur and will tap the country’s vast oil reserves as part of a rebuilding effort.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement he has seen “no evidence” to justify the Trump administration acting without congressional approval.

“The Venezuelan people deserve to thrive under a democratically elected government. But the Trump administration’s trampling of our Constitution and unauthorized military action serve only to weaken U.S. democracy and make the world more dangerous,” Bennet said. “Congress must reassert its role in these decisions to prevent the president from his continued irresponsible conduct.”

What we know about a US strike that captured Venezuela’s Maduro

U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper and Reps. Joe Neguse, Diana DeGette, Jason Crow and Brittany Pettersen, all Democrats, similarly condemned the action in statements posted Saturday morning.

“While Maduro is an illegitimate and brutal leader, Trump absolutely should not be dragging us into a war with Venezuela,” Pettersen said.

“Sending U.S. forces into Venezuela to snatch a foreign leader in the middle of the night is illegal and unconstitutional. Only Congress has the power to declare war – not one unhinged president," she continued.

Republican Reps. Gabe Evans and Jeff Crank praised Trump’s decision as a move that will make the country safer.

“The arrest of Nicolás Maduro -- a narco terrorist responsible for the death of countless Americans, exporting violence via gangs and cartels like Tren de Aragua, corruption, and drug trafficking -- sends a clear message: The United States will not tolerate regimes that poison our people and threaten our national security,” Evans said in a statement.

But Republican Rep. Jeff Hurd, who represents Colorado’s Western Slope, offered a more guarded reaction.

Although describing Maduro as an illegitimate ruler whose regime harms the U.S. and other countries, Hurd called for any military involvement to be “narrowly defined, legally grounded and coordinated with Congress.”

“American strength abroad is reinforced by fidelity to the Constitution at home. I will work closely with the president and my colleagues to ensure U.S. actions remain focused (and) lawful and ensure dictators around the world know harm to America will never be tolerated,” Hurd said.

Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert had not released a statement about Maduro’s capture as of Saturday afternoon.

Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, described Saturday’s action “a moment to celebrate the ouster of the brutal socialist dictator of Venezuela” and called for the U.S. and others to support candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, who opposition leaders say actually won the country’s contested 2024 presidential election.

Polis added that he was “troubled” by the lack of congressional involvement in the process and called for a clear transition plan in Venezuela.

“We cannot have a failed foreign policy misadventure; the Venezuelan people and region deserve better,” he said in a statement.

In Denver, news of the U.S. action drew roughly 200 people to the Capitol complex on Saturday afternoon to protest against a possible war in Venezuela.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.

In line with other would-be patrons outside the Lower Downtown spot, she claimed to be a 25-year-old woman named Shaelene. But the bouncer wasn’t buying it. He kept the girl’s fake ID and told her she wasn’t getting in.

As the girl walked away, she pulled a gun from her jacket and fired back at the crowd outside the bar. Five people were shot; they all survived. Surveillance footage showed the girl’s face as she waited in line, and captured her pulling out the gun and firing.

But Denver police still needed to figure out who she was. They found the man she’d been in line with; he claimed they’d just met and that he’d been hoping for a one-night stand. Two days after the shooting, police put out a flyer with Metro Denver Crime Stoppers, a nonprofit organization that pays cash — typically up to $2,000 — for anonymous tips that lead to arrests.

Within a day, 10 separate tipsters named Keanna Rosenburgh as the shooter. They provided the police with her age, height and home address, according to an affidavit. Police detectives then matched Rosenburgh’s driver’s license photo to the surveillance footage. She was charged and ultimately pleaded guilty in the shooting.

The case is one of hundreds in which tips to Metro Denver Crime Stoppers helped lead authorities to culprits. The 49-year-old Crime Stoppers organization — founded in 1976 by an Albuquerque police detective and established in Denver in 1981 — has become a key tool for law enforcement across Colorado’s Front Range in an age of widespread surveillance.

“They’ve proven to be invaluable,” Denver police Cmdr. Matt Clark said.

In Denver in 2024, Crime Stoppers passed along 215 tips about fugitives, Clark said, and 555 tips related to Denver homicides and non-fatal shootings.

As a whole, the organization — which works with police departments across the metro area — took in 4,000 tips in 2024 and paid out $32,000 in rewards, said Jennifer Evans, co-president of the board. About 75% of the award money was connected to Denver cases, with $24,000 awarded across 47 cases, she said.

The tipline has become a “core investigative strategy” for Denver detectives, Clark said, enabling officers to quickly identify suspects from now nearly ubiquitous surveillance cameras. At least 50 arrests in 2024 were tied to Crime Stoppers tips, Evans said.

The anonymous tips are a starting point, and detectives often need to do significant follow-up investigation to corroborate the tips with evidence that is admissible in court, Clark said.

“We are simultaneously doing traditional investigative methods,” he said. “But having someone in the community who knows the person, sees the photo and says, ‘That’s my neighbor, my coworker, my family member’ — it creates a tremendous amount of efficiency, accountability for the offender, and justice for the victim.”

Over the last five years, Metro Denver Crime Stoppers has received 22,000 tips, awarded $250,000 in reward money and contributed to at least 470 arrests, Evans said.

Since 1981, Metro Denver Crime Stoppers has paid out nearly $1.4 million in awards — an average of about $32,000 per year — and its tips have led to more than 3,300 arrests, the organization says.

The organization raises funds through donations and its Shred-a-Thons, in which the group collects documents to be professionally shredded and accepts donations from people who stop by to dispose of those documents. The shredding companies will sometimes donate their services as well, Evans said.

Reward amounts vary. While the standard reward advertised is up to $2,000 per arrest, the nonprofit organization might break that money up among multiple tipsters, and the board also considers the value of the particular information provided when determining the reward amount, Evans said.

“It also matters if it is a sensitive crime, like crimes against a child, an animal, we will pay differently,” she said.

CrimeStoppers’ volunteer board, which is the sole entity that decides how reward money is paid out, includes seven community members who work in various industries, including security, finance, construction and education, as well a Denver police detective who acts as the liaison between the nonprofit and the police agency.

Evans declined to say how many tipsters collected award money in the Rosenburgh case, citing the need for tipsters’ anonymity.

Metro Denver Crime Stoppers credits its anonymous process for much of its effectiveness. Tipsters are paid if the information they provide leads to an arrest — not a conviction, like some other programs — and they stay anonymous throughout the process. Tipsters collect the award money by presenting unique codes at particular banks.

Not all of the reward money that is awarded is actually collected. In 2020, about 40% of reward money went unclaimed, according to an annual report.

“I’m not convinced it is the money that is motivating people to come forward,” Clark said. “I think it is the anonymity more that drives traffic to Crime Stoppers, and their credibility over the last four decades. …I generally feel people are doing it for the right reasons, and there is a collateral benefit where they will collect the reward.”

Crime Stoppers will offer higher rewards in cases when particular donors come forward. Often, the donors are family members who hope that more money will bring in quality tips, Evans said. Clark noted that the higher rewards can generate more media attention, which can reinvigorate a case.

It also gives grieving family members a concrete way to help with the investigation, he added.

“They feel helplessness, a lot of times, with a lack of resolution, answers, even with info coming from the police department, so this is a way of advocating for their loved one, a victim, a coworker, to say, ‘We want to help,'” Clark said.

Evans declined to share the largest reward paid by the agency, but offered rewards have topped hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The organization offered a $100,000 reward for information in the 2011 killing of Thad Tigges, and a $125,000 reward in the 2008 murder of Adams County prosecutor Sean May, both of which remain unsolved.

The Crime Stoppers’ process casts a wide net and an influx of tips can send investigators down the wrong path. In the LoDo bar shooting in Denver, the police detective also investigated five tips that wrongly identified different people as the shooter, according to Rosenburgh’s affidavit.

“For every helpful tip we receive, we get calls that have little or nothing to do with the case,” said David Snelling, a spokesman for the Arvada Police Department, who said the department uses Crime Stoppers several times a year.

The reward money has at times led to disputes. The organization promised a $100,000 for information in the 2005 killing of Denver police Detective Donald Young, then reduced the award to $50,000 and paid out to a handful of tipsters on the case — but not to the killer’s grandmother, who led her grandson into a store in Mexico where he was apprehended, because she did not give her information directly to Crime Stoppers.

In 2011, a man then in prison unsuccessfully sued in an attempt to collect the entire $100,000 reward in the killing of Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams after the man was awarded only a portion of the total amount for his role in the case.

And in 2014, a man who was wrongly accused of being a stalker sued both Crime Stoppers and Nancy Grace after a selfie of his was featured in a Crime Stoppers bulletin and on the national news show as the suspected stalker. That lawsuit was settled, court records show.

Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

The workers were detained after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrived at the Hacienda Real restaurant Tuesday, immigrant-rights advocates said. The operation also targeted a home in nearby Dillon Valley. Agents’ clothing identified them as part of ICE’s investigative arm, Homeland Security Investigations, and they removed computer equipment from the restaurant.

In a Facebook post, Hacienda Real said it had been working with ICE “for several months” after the agency received an anonymous call “reporting that we had undocumented workers in our restaurant.”

“Unfortunately, this process led to a broader inspection of the restaurant,” the business wrote. Because its equipment was taken, the restaurant is now temporarily closed.

The operation comes amid an increase in ICE actions across the United States and Colorado, including in the state’s rural and resort communities. Immigration arrests rose statewide throughout the summer and increasingly have resulted in detentions of people with no prior criminal convictions, The Denver Post reported recently.

Voces Unidas, an advocacy group, has documented other ICE operations on the Western Slope, and the Vail Daily reported an increase in ICE operations in May in Eagle County, which borders Frisco’s Summit County. ICE has arrested 69 people in Craig and Glenwood Springs so far this year, arrest data show, with 140 more detained in Grand Junction — all significant increases for those areas compared to last year.

Alex Sánchez, the president and CEO of Voces Unidas, said he believed four people were arrested in this week’s Frisco operation, though his group had only definitively confirmed two. Those individuals are now in the Aurora detention center, he said.

“We cannot hide the fact that there’s victims, that families went to bed or tried to go to bed without their family members — and we know they were calling us trying to find their loved ones,” Sánchez said.

Summit County Sheriff Jaime FitzSimons said in a statement that ICE conducted a “targeted federal criminal investigation” Tuesday. He said his office learned of the situation as it began.

FitzSimons wrote that “ICE’s primary purpose (Tuesday) was to serve search warrants connected to their criminal investigation, not to conduct civil immigration enforcement.”

But the action has gained wide notice in the community, which includes ski resorts, ritzy homes and thousands of service workers, including many immigrant families.

The ICE operation and arrests were first reported this week by the Summit Daily News.

Tony Byrd, the superintendent of the Summit School District, told representatives from U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet’s and U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse’s offices on Thursday that the ICE operation “was terrible and may happen again.” He said he wanted federal policymakers to stand up and oppose similar efforts in the future.

“The experience we had this week … was absolutely brutal for the students and families of this community, and we witnessed it live,” Byrd said at the beginning of Thursday evening’s school board meeting.

Later in the meeting, Byrd said school attendance dropped 35% late last week, when rumors spread of a coming ICE raid. On Tuesday, the day of this week’s operation, “over 200 students were doing everything they could to go home,” he said. Attendance on Thursday was 10% to 14% lower compared to the district’s normal average, he said.

Colorado House Speaker Julie McCluskie, who represents Frisco, said the biggest outcome of ICE’s operations would be “the amount of fear and suspicion” sown in the community.

“Our immigrant community is a critical part of our neighborhood fabric,” she said in an interview Thursday. “They are a part of our workforce. Families are part of our school system. Our immigrant community attends churches with us and community events.

“That is what makes Summit County so special, and I am deeply concerned with the amount of fear that is part of the outcome of rumors, and this raid, and the rhetoric that we are hearing at the national level.”

As ICE agents conducted the operation Tuesday, local residents shouted at them and stood in front of their vehicles, according to video captured by the Summit Daily News. One woman can be heard yelling, “You are separating and harassing. You are not wanted here.”

In a video posted to social media by Mountain Dreamers, restaurant owner Luis Flores thanked the community for its support. He indicated that his lawyer was in contact with ICE and that “we are clean of everything that has been said.”

It’s unclear if the Dillon Valley house and Frisco restaurant were part of the same operation. Sánchez said his group has been told by “first-hand witnesses and other parties connected to this case” that the two locations were part of the same effort and that the home is connected to the restaurant.

A restaurant employee declined to comment when reached by email Thursday and did not respond to a follow-up question about whether workers had been detained.

FitzSimons, the county sheriff, wrote in his statement that ICE had publicly stated that no one was arrested Tuesday. On Thursday, a sheriff’s office spokesman referred questions to ICE and did not respond to a voicemail seeking more information.

Steve Kotecki, ICE’s Denver spokesman, and regional representatives of the agency did not return a message seeking comment.

The legislation, unveiled to reporters by Democratic lawmakers Tuesday, is expected to be introduced later this week. According to details from Gov. Jared Polis’ office, the bill proposes capping larger hospitals’ reimbursements at 150% to 165% of what Medicare pays for the same care. Doing so could save the state and small businesses money on employees’ health plans.

The proposed caps would amount to about half of what hospitals currently charge private insurers, including for state employees’ plans.

The proposal would also set a minimum payment level for primary care and behavioral health services — to better shore up providers working in those fields — while directing savings from the reimbursement caps to beleaguered frontline clinics.

“Other states like Oregon and Montana have implemented maximums for what the state will pay hospitals for state employees’ health care, which has helped their state budgets and saved state employees money on health care,” said Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat and a sponsor of the coming bill.

She said the state should examine if it’s “fair” that hospitals charge state government three times more than it charges Medicare for the same care.

The bill is co-sponsored by fellow Democrats Rep. Kyle Brown and Sens. Iman Jodeh and Jeff Bridges. Sirota and Bridges are members of the Joint Budget Committee, which is tasked with cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from the upcoming state budget in coming months to close a gap.

They both noted that fiscal situation as a reason to try to cap health costs.

Their measure would apply to the state health plan, which covers about 60,000 Coloradans working for state government, and to small employers who have 50 or fewer workers, adding another 200,000-some patients.

But the bill would not apply to larger employers, which would still be subject to current hospital reimbursement levels. Brown said lawmakers were trying to target the measure to smaller businesses with tighter margins.

The bill would apply to 54 of the state’s 86 acute-care hospitals, according to the Colorado Hospital Association. That primarily includes urban hospitals along the Front Range but not smaller, isolated hospitals common in rural areas.

Hospitals charge private insurers 291% more than they are paid for the same care by Medicare, legislators said Tuesday. (The Colorado Hospital Association puts that figure at 285%.) Supporters said capping hospital reimbursements would save the state health plan — and thus the state itself — more than $50 million a year, based on research by Brown University.

That research also indicated that capping reimbursements would have a “nominal impact” on hospitals’ finances, which are largely shored up by patients with private insurance.

The bill would take effect in 2027. Should it pass this year, 80% of its savings would be reinvested in the state’s primary care fund to support federally qualified health centers; that money would also be eligible for matching dollars from the federal government. The remaining 20% would be used to lower state employees’ premiums and boost their other benefits.

Cash-strapped federally qualified health centers — which care for lower-income Coloradans who are often on Medicaid or are uninsured — have rang increasingly panicked alarm bells in recent months.

As the pandemic emergency faded, millions of Medicaid enrollees were removed from the program. Colorado has lost more Medicaid members than nearly any other state, meaning health centers have provided care for more and more uninsured patients — and thus received no reimbursement for them.

The legislation will doubtless be contentious. The Colorado Hospital Association hasn’t formally voted to oppose the bill, spokeswoman Julie Lonborg said Tuesday, but the group generally opposes the type of cap lawmakers are seeking.

“This is rate-setting, and that’s a problem,” she said. “It’s problematic and ultimately isn’t the right long-term solution for the state. Seventy percent of our hospitals are operating at unsustainable margins, which means they aren’t making enough to put away for a rainy day.”

She said hospitals charge more to payers other than Medicare to make up for how little Medicare and Medicaid pay. According to a January report from the state Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, nearly half of Colorado hospitals’ patient revenue in 2023 came from private insurance, even though Medicaid and Medicare provided coverage for more people than private insurers.

Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.

Sometimes bears die from the sedation required for relocation. Other times they must be euthanized for public safety. Of the 3,526 bear encounters reported to Colorado Parks and Wildlife last year, 33 bears were relocated and 63 put down.

Because bears must consume some 20,000 calories a day in the autumn months to prepare for hibernation, fall can prove particularly perilous for the big omnivores. Unsecured trash cans and compost bins, bird feeders, and ripe fruit scattered on the ground draw bears into neighborhoods where their appetite gets them in trouble. This year, bears have been spotted in Highlands Ranch, Lone Tree, Golden, Littleton, and other cities along the Front Range.

We must find ways to protect these bears.

Community Fruit Rescue was started to foster healthy coexistence with bears by getting a source of temptation out of bears’ way and has embraced a greater mission supporting human, tree, and animal health. The rescue is one of several organizations that organize volunteers to glean unharvested fruits and vegetables from farms, public spaces, and backyards.

This year they are expanding to Lyons, and every community in the wildlife-urban interface needs a fruit rescue team.

Deterring bears from backyard forays isn’t the only reason to ensure fruit doesn’t go to waste. More than a third of all food produced in the US is never eaten. It’s thrown out or left to rot unharvested. Not only is this a waste of food, it’s a waste of the resources used to grow, harvest, store, transport, and prepare it including water, chemicals, labor, and energy mainly derived from fossil fuels. Uneaten, food waste gets buried in landfills where it produces the greenhouse gas methane which contributes to global warming. Wasted food is also a wasted opportunity to help families struggling to put a meal on the table during a time of inflation.

Fortunately, Coloradans are tackling the challenge of food waste in our state with creativity and resolve. A couple of years ago, this column highlighted the work of We Don’t Waste, a Denver-based organization that recovers food the industry would have been thrown out and distributes it through hunger relief organizations and mobile markets. Since 2009, We Don’t Waste has recovered 50 million pounds of delicious, nutritious food from restaurants and other venues that would not have otherwise made its way to a plate.

This week I spoke with Melanie Hill, the executive director of Community Fruit Rescue, the nonprofit that organizes volunteers to harvest unpicked fruit from neighborhoods, parks, and orchards in Boulder, Longmont, and Lyons.

Since 2014, Community Fruit Rescue has rescued 110,000 pounds of potentially wasted fruit giving much of it to organizations serving low-income individuals and families and animal rescue nonprofits. The fruit rescue also rents out DIY harvest kits and cider presses to help individuals harvest their own fruit trees and provides education on how to keep backyard trees healthy.

Thanks to a wet spring and hot summer, Front Range fruit trees produced more fruit than usual and that fruit has ripened faster. Fruit rescue organizations are in need of more volunteers to keep up and donations to build capacity for the future.

As the human population thrives in proximity to wildlife, we need to do our part to ensure peaceful coexistence. It is far better to remove the backyard temptation than to remove the bear. And, by recovering fruit and other potential food waste, we can reduce water and fossil fuel consumption and help Coloradans in need.

Krista L. Kafer is a weekly Denver Post columnist. Follow her on Twitter: @kristakafer.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

WASHINGTON — Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a longtime leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, and Joaquín Guzmán López, a son of another infamous cartel leader, were arrested by U.S. authorities in Texas on Thursday, the U.S. Justice Department said.

A leader of the powerful Sinaloa cartel for decades alongside Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Zambada is one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world and known for running the cartel’s smuggling operations while keeping a lower profile.

The U.S. government had offered a reward of up to $15 million for information leading to Zambada’s capture. The Justice Department said the men were arrested in El Paso but didn’t immediately provide details about how they were taken into custody.

Zambada and Guzmán López, who have eluded authorities for decades, oversaw the trafficking of “tens of thousands of pounds of drugs into the United States, along with related violence,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said, adding that now they will “face justice in the United States.”

“Fentanyl is the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced, and the Justice Department will not rest until every single cartel leader, member, and associate responsible for poisoning our communities is held accountable,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

Mexican authorities didn’t immediately comment on the arrests.

U.S. officials have been seeking Zambada’s capture for years, and he has been charged in a number of U.S. cases. He was charged in February in the Eastern District of New York with conspiring to manufacture and distribute the synthetic opioid. Prosecutors said he was continuing to lead the Sinaloa cartel, “one of the most violent and powerful drug trafficking organizations in the world.”

Zambada, one of the longest-surviving capos in Mexico, was considered the cartel’s strategist, more involved in day-to-day operations than his flashier and better-known boss, “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was sentenced to life in prison in the U.S. in 2019 and is the father of Guzmán López.

Zambada is an old-fashioned capo in an era of younger kingpins known for their flamboyant lifestyles of club-hopping and brutal tactics of beheading, dismembering and even skinning their rivals. While Zambada has fought those who challenged him, he is known for concentrating on the business side of trafficking and avoiding gruesome cartel violence that would draw attention.

In an April 2010 interview with the Mexican magazine Proceso, he acknowledged that he lived in constant fear of going to prison and would contemplate suicide rather than be captured.

“I’m terrified of being incarcerated,” Zambada said. “I’d like to think that, yes, I would kill myself.”

The interview was surprising for a kingpin known for keeping his head down, but he gave strict instructions on where and when the encounter would take place, and the article gave no hint of his whereabouts.

Zambada reputedly won the loyalty of locals in his home state of Sinaloa and neighboring Durango through his largess, sponsoring local farmers and distributing money and beer in his birthplace of El Alamo.

Although little is known about Zambada’s early life, he is believed to have gotten his start as an enforcer in the 1970s.

By the early 1990s, he was a major player in the Juarez cartel, transporting tons of cocaine and marijuana.

Zambada started gaining the trust of Colombian traffickers, allegiances that helped him come out on top in the cartel world of ever-shifting alliances. Eventually he became so powerful that he broke off from the Juarez cartel, but still managed to keep strong ties with the gang and avoided a turf war. He also developed a partnership with “El Chapo” Guzman that would take him to the top of the Sinaloa Cartel.

Zambada’s detention follows some important arrests of other Sinaloa cartel figures, including one of his sons and another son of “El Chapo” Guzmán, Ovidio Guzmán López. Zambada’s son pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court in San Diego in 2021 to being a leader in the Sinaloa cartel.

In recent years, Guzman’s sons have led a faction of the cartel known as the little Chapos, or “Chapitos” that has been identified as a main exporter of fentanyl to the U.S. market.

They were seen as more violent and flamboyant than Zambada. Their security chief was arrested by Mexican authorities in November.

Ovidio Guzmán López was arrested and extradited to the U.S. last year. He pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges in Chicago in September.

Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the DEA, said Zambada’s arrest is important but unlikely to have much impact on the flow of drugs to the U.S. Joaquín Guzmán López was the least influential of the four sons who made up the Chapitos, Vigil said.

“This is a great blow for the rule of law, but is it going to have an impact on the cartel? I don’t think so,” Vigil said.

“It’s not going to have a dent on the drug trade because somebody from within the cartel is going to replace him,” Vigil said.

___

Verza and Sherman reported from Mexico City.

Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

“I didn’t have all that much time to be asking these questions while he was at home,” Dick, a Westminster resident, told the Denver Post in an interview. “He was a distant father, and I imagine a lot of that came from what happened to him during the war and in service.”

After Richard died, Dick turned to military archives, old photos and interviews with the surviving members of his father’s B-24 Liberator airplane crew to learn about the veteran’s journey. Through his research, Dick discovered that his father, despite being seriously injured in a plane crash before enduring months as a prisoner of war, had never received a Purple Heart.

For seven years, Dick worked to correct the oversight. In April, the Air Force agreed to posthumously award Richard a Purple Heart.

The veteran was 22 years old when he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps in February 1941, according to his son. The service was renamed the U.S. Army Air Forces in June of that year and became the U.S. Air Force in 1947.

“He grew up through the Depression and everything else,” Dick told The Post. “I think he joined because he was looking for three square meals a day.”

Olson later became the co-pilot of a B-24 bomber plane in the 484th Bombardment Group combat unit. A week after D-Day, while stationed in southern Italy, his crew was shot down over the Adriatic Sea by eight German fighter planes while flying to Munich.

“They lost an engine, and they couldn’t keep up with the rest of the bombers, so they had to turn around to go back,” Dick said. “Two of the gunners were killed on the plane. And then the plane was set on fire and I think they had two more engines shot out.

“But there was a big fire in the bomb bay so they had to get out of the plane. So they did, and everybody bailed out, the ones that were still alive.”

Shell fragments struck Olson’s leg and he sustained a back injury that left him with chronic pain.

Most of the men landed on the Italian coastline northeast of Venice, according to conversations Dick had with B-24 crew member John Hassan. He was transferred to two other POW camps and after 10 months of incarceration, Olson was liberated on April 29, 1945, from Moosburg, Germany.

“He just said it was a very dull existence and of course they were hungry all the time,” Dick told The Post. “There was not a whole lot to do there. They played sports and the American Red Cross supplied them with books and boardgames and sporting equipment and different things to keep their morale up.”

Olson stayed in the Air Force for 16 years after his liberation from the POW camp and became a major, father and husband before leaving the military in 1961, according to his obituary.

“My parents split when I was about 13,” Dick said. “He moved away from the household and they got divorced.”

After the divorce in 1969, Dick saw Richard three more times before the veteran passed away in 1996 from multiple myeloma.

“I was always interested in his Air Force career. And since he never talked about these other guys, I wanted to find them and talk to them myself,” Dick said.

He connected with John Hassan, the navigator in Richard’s B-24 crew, in 1997. “Going through some of his papers, I found a phone number for John and called him up and started looking for all the other crew members also,” Dick said, “I eventually did make contact with the ones that were living or family members for the ones who had passed away.

“John was my dad’s best friend on the crew and we became really good friends,” Dick added. “He pretty much had a photographic memory, so that’s how I know an awful lot about that crew.”

While researching the crew, Dick helped the plane’s bombardier, Walter Chapman, get a Distinguished Flying Cross he should have been awarded decades prior.

Like Chapman, Olson was also missing an award: a Purple Heart for sustaining an injury while in the line of duty.

“There was mention of everything else, like the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medals,” Dick said. “All the ribbons and medals that he was entitled to, except for the Purple Heart.”

Olson’s capture as a POW right after the B-24 crash meant his wounds went undocumented. In 2017, Dick decided to file a claim with the Air Force Board for Correction of Military Records and prove that his father had been injured. “I thought to myself, this is unfinished business, I’ve got to see if I can get this thing,” Dick said.

After an extensive filing process, the Board for Correction rejected Dick’s request in 2020.

Brian Schenk, founder of Midwest Military and Veterans Law, agreed to work with Dick pro bono and together, they took the Board for Correction to federal court, determined to prove that Olson had been injured during active duty.

“Dick Olson’s father was a war hero and he had such extreme humility that he himself never sought a Purple Heart,” Schenk told the Denver Post.

“I thought to myself, the old man went through the wringer, and he deserves to have this,” Dick said. “I told the Air Force in the letter that I wrote with my first application that I’m doing it for his legacy and for posterity. People should know that he was injured fighting for his country.”

On April 23, Dick won his case and the Board for Correction agreed to posthumously grant Olson a Purple Heart Award.

“He would have been real happy to wear this purple heart,” Dick said. “I think he would have been pretty proud of the fight we put up to make this happen.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

On the last Tuesday in December, Jacque VanBuskirk received the phone call her family had awaited for generations — the remains of an uncle she’d never met, a World War II prisoner of war who had been considered missing in action for almost 82 years, finally had been identified.

The body of 25-year-old Clifford H. Strickland, a U.S. Army technician fifth grade from Fowler in southeastern Colorado, was officially identified five years after being exhumed from a Philippine cemetery, where he and other POWs had been reburied as unknown soldiers following the end of the war.

Next month, Strickland’s remains will finally be returned home to Colorado, where they will be laid to rest in the same cemetery as his mother and father.

“It’s just like a piece of you is missing and you don’t know where it is,” said VanBuskirk, 65, who lives in Arizona. “It’s exciting, but at the same time, it’s sad because we’re planning a memorial and funeral for my uncle. But at the same time, he’s coming home and will be buried near his parents.”

This Memorial Day, Strickland’s family is one of at least four to receive news in recent months that the bodies of their long-missing Colorado soldiers had been formally identified. The remains of Army Cpl. John A. Spruell, from Cortez, who went missing during the Korean War; and Army Staff Sgt. Harold A. Schafer, from Denver, and Army Private James B. McCartney, from Ridgway, both killed in World War II, are among those newly identified.

Strickland enlisted in April 1940, before the United States entered World War II. Initially stationed as a mule driver at Hickam Field in Hawaii, he later was assigned to Company C, 803rd Engineer Battalion and arrived in Luzon, at the northern end of the Philippines, in October 1941, according to his family. In December 1941, Japanese troops invaded Luzon and, four months later, U.S. forces in Bataan surrendered.

The Japanese captured thousands of U.S. and Filipino service members as prisoners of war, Strickland among them.

Strickland and his fellow prisoners endured a 65-mile trek through the Philippines, known as the Bataan Death March, before arriving at Camp O’Donnell. During the five-day journey, troops were starved, beaten and stabbed with bayonets.

“Camp O’Donnell was the first camp that the prisoners were taken to,” said Gregory Kupsky, a historian assigned to Strickland’s case by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. “But the death rate was so high that the Japanese ultimately made the decision to close that camp and move most of the prisoners to Cabanatuan instead.”

More than 2,500 POWs, including Strickland, died in the Cabanatuan prison camp during World War II, according to the federal agency.

In June 1942, records show Strickland was admitted to the Cabanatuan hospital with dysentery and malaria. He died a month later and was buried by his fellow prisoners with 11 other soldiers in an unmarked grave — Common Grave 215 — according to burial records created by Cabanatuan prisoners.

“The summer was really bad in terms of death rate,” Kupsky said. “You had dozens of people dying per day and the way the burials worked is the Japanese would assign work details, and then prisoners, who themselves were in really bad shape, are carrying remains out and digging trenches to bury them in. …and they weren’t allowed to mark the graves, so it was very hard to keep track of who was buried where throughout this process.”

Learning from letters, photos and memories

Although VanBuskirk never knew her uncle — no living members of her family met him — she became acquainted with the veteran through stories, photos and memories passed from generation to generation.

“They had talked about him being quiet or somber and he was known for his ability to whisper,” VanBuskirk said.

In 2017, VanBuskirk’s cousin found a suitcase containing 20 letters Strickland sent home during his time in the Army. In the letters, Strickland recorded poetry written by fellow soldiers, snippets of his life in the Army and subtle jokes.

“What was interesting, that I know about him now, that I didn’t know about him as I was growing up, was that from his letters, he was kind of a jokester,” VanBuskirk said.

“I’m getting to be a full sleepy head, I sleep about 12 hours per day now. I suppose that when I come home I will be too lazy to work so I will have to get back in the Army again,” Strickland wrote in one letter. “The Army is the easiest job a man can get.”

Twelve years ago, VanBuskirk’s family provided the U.S. Army with their first DNA sample, in hopes that it could eventually be used to identify Strickland.

Since 2015, Kupsky and other POW agency representatives working to identify soldiers buried at Cabanatuan have met with the family almost every year, updating them on the disinterment and analysis process.

Following the end of World War II, personnel from the American Graves Registration Service exhumed the POWs buried at Cabanatuan and moved their remains to a U.S. military mausoleum near Manila, according to the Defense Department. The service examined the remains in 1947 but was only able to identify five of the POWs who had been buried in Common Grave 215. The rest were reburied as unknowns at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial.

In 2018, after an exhaustive approval process, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s archeologists and anthropologists once again exhumed the remains that had been in Common Grave 215. They were brought from Manila to the agency’s lab in Hawaii for analysis.

Kupsky said the POW agency had a general idea of who had been buried in Common Grave 215, thanks to information pieced together from hospital admittance documents and burial logs created by other prisoners. Records from after the war also linked Strickland to the grave.

“The tricky part with all of these cases is it’s like a puzzle with a lot of pieces missing and you don’t know which pieces you’re going to end up with. You don’t know how much of the story you’ll be able to reconstruct,” Kupsky said. “All you can do is build as much as you can and hope that your colleagues can fill in the rest.”

“They all ended up with a hole in their heart”

Strickland’s remains were confirmed Dec. 20 and are among the more than 60 identified so far as part of the Cabanatuan project. Kupsky and other representatives from the POW agency, as well as personnel from the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and the Army Casualty Office, met with VanBuskirk and her family in February.

“They had made new dog tags for Clifford Strickland,” Kupsky said of the family. “And one of the family members gave me a hug and gave me my own dog tag of his.

“It’s extremely rewarding to be able to know that we were able to reconstruct parts of their stories that had been lost,” he added. “And in addition to that, be able to give closure to the families and give their loved ones back to be buried with their name on their grave.”

In June, Strickland’s great nephew, Air Force Capt. Daniel Strickland, will escort the remains back to Colorado from Hickam Air Force Base at Pearl Harbor for a full military funeral.

“It has been almost 10 years since we filed with the DPAA,” VanBuskirk said, referring to the Defense Department’s POW agency. “And all of the family before had passed and he hadn’t been identified or recovered, so they all ended up with a hole in their heart that just wasn’t fixable. Now it’s a healing of the heart for so many of us.”

On June 29, almost 82 years after his death, Strickland will be laid to rest near his parents at the Union Highland Cemetery in Florence, near where he grew up.

“…Now don’t scorn the soldier but clasp him by the hand, for the uniform he wears means protection to our land,” Strickland penned in a 1941 letter, relaying a poem written by an unknown soldier. “The government picks its soldiers from the million far and wide, so please place him as your equal, good buddies side by side. When a soldier goes to battle you cheer him on the way, and you say he is a hero when in the ground he lay…”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

Clifford H. Strickland, 25, was a Fifth Grade U.S. Army Technician and member of Company C, 803rd Engineer Battalion when the Japanese forces invaded the Philippine Islands in December 1941. Thousands of U.S. and Filipino service members were captured when U.S. forces in Baatan surrendered in April 1942.

Prisoners endured the 65-mile Baatan Death March before being held at the Cabanatuan POW camp. Strickland was among those reported captured. According to the release, more than 2,500 POW died in the Cabanatuan camp during WWII.

Historical records report that Strickland died on July 29, 1942 and was buried in Common Grave 215 with other deceased prisoners.

American Graves Registration Service personnel later exhumed those buried at the Cabanatuan cemetery and relocated the remains to a temporary U.S. Military mausoleum near Manila. In 1947, five out of 12 sets of remains from Common Grave 215 were identified. The unidentified remains were buried as unknowns at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial.

In early 2018, the remains from Common Grave 215 were exhumed and sent to the DPAA laboratory. Scientists from DPAA used dental and anthropological analysis, circumstantial evidence and mitochondrial DNA analysis from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System to identify Strickland.

Strickland will be buried in Florence on June 29.

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.