When notorious serial killer Ted Bundy leaped from a second-story window in Aspen’s courthouse and escaped into the Colorado high country in 1975, the Pitkin County sheriff immediately called up his posse to aid in the manhunt.
Area residents — some on horseback, armed with sidearms and clad in Stetsons — joined with sheriff’s deputies and other law enforcement officers to block roads, search cars and go door-to-door to hunt for Bundy, then suspected in the murders of eight women. Bundy broke into a cabin just south of Aspen as the June manhunt swelled to a 150-person effort. He pillaged supplies and tried to cut across to U.S. 50, but was thwarted by the spring snowpack.
Bundy turned back to the mountain cabin but found posse members staking it out. He retreated and stole a car. Around 2 a.m. on June 13, Bundy was headed toward Interstate 70 in that stolen car — but was so exhausted that he weaved across lanes. He was pulled over for suspected drunken driving and arrested after a week on the run.
The sheriff’s posse was credited with helping to thwart Bundy’s escape by blocking him from resting at the cabin. He might have been awake enough to drive unnoticed out of town had he been able to recuperate at the cabin first, observers speculated.
Although Bundy’s escapade occurred a half-century ago, sheriff’s posses — volunteers who county sheriffs can call on for a variety of duties — are not a vestige of Colorado’s past. More than a third of sheriff’s offices across the state still maintain active posses, The Denver Post found by surveying all 64 of Colorado’s sheriffs.
Most sheriffs keep uncertified posses, with civilian volunteers performing duties like search and rescue, traffic control, patrols, crowd control and crime scene security, The Post found. A handful of Colorado posses also include reserve officers — state-certified, volunteer police officers with almost full police power — but more often, reserves are a separate unit.
There are no statewide standards for posse members; each sheriff sets their own training regimen. Reserve officers, on the other hand, must complete at least 254 hours of training and be certified by the state’s Peace Office Standards and Training, or POST, board.
Some sheriffs have come to rely on posse members more in recent years as the number of reserve officers has steadily declined. Colorado counted 528 certified reserve officers in 2015; that number slid to just 360 this year, a 32% drop over the last decade. In 2018, the POST board certified 149 new reserve officers. In 2024, it certified just 19.
Leaders at sheriff’s offices across the state pointed to several factors behind the decline in reserve officers, including the extensive required training, increased costs, a general shift away from volunteering, and the end of qualified immunity, a legal defense that previously protected sheriff’s deputies from being sued in their individual capacities in most cases.
“What we found with our reserve (officers) was that life happened fast,” said Capt. Michael Yowellc at the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, which disbanded its reserve officer program in 2023. “And trying to live two lives, one as a law enforcement officer and one working at the bank, they just collided too much.”
The agency still keeps about a 15-member posse, he said, which doubles the manpower of its 15 deputies. The posse takes a supporting role and typically does not engage in direct law enforcement, Yowell said.
“We don’t put a gun on their hip and say, ‘Hey, come back me up,’” Yowell said. “They are more of a, ‘Hey, we need that ATV, could you put it on a trailer and bring it to us?’”
The posse was double its size years ago, but interest has waned. Still, the posse members do provide an extra set of eyes when deputies are spread thin, Yowell said.
“It sure makes a cop feel better, when he is 60 miles from the nearest backup, to know that there is a guy there who can help him if anything — we hope that never happens, but they’re there if we need them,” he said.
A special power of sheriffs
Posses long predate the United States.
They are rooted in English traditions that date back to the ninth century, particularly the notion that policing should be done by the community, for the community, said David Kopel, research director at the Independence Institute, a libertarian-leaning Denver think tank.
“Posses were important on the Western frontier, but they were quite pervasive and common in more settled areas in the east for many, many years,” Kopel said. “When people were moving to Colorado, starting with the Gold Rush in 1858, and they began using posses, they were not creating something new.”
Under both common law and Colorado law, judges, coroners and sheriffs can all call up posses, he noted, though the power is today almost exclusively used by sheriffs. Technically, participating in a posse is a civic duty, like jury duty, that can be compelled for men over the age of 16, Kopel said.
“But we haven’t had anything where anyone has been forced to do it for quite a long time,” he said. In the modern era, posses have largely been used when sheriffs do not have enough deputies to handle a situation, be it a blizzard, wildfire, concert or football game.
“Instead of tying up a sworn deputy manning a roadblock out in the middle of nowhere, they’ll do that for us,” said Park County Sheriff Tom McGraw, who has about a dozen regularly active posse members, all of whom carry guns after going through training and qualifying on the range.
Almost 20 years after Bundy’s escape, a posse of about 100 citizens was formed in 1994 after Hinsdale County’s sheriff was shot and killed by two bank robbery suspects, leaving the sheriff’s office with just one deputy. The posse helped to block the suspects’ escape.
Another 20 years after that, Larimer County’s then-Sheriff Justin Smith deputized local firefighters as posse members after the 2013 floods cut off some parts of the county, so the firefighters could work as “peacekeepers” if necessary, he said.
“We had a period of time when the county was cut off, we were extremely limited on what resources we had,” said Smith, who will take over as executive director of the National Sheriffs’ Association next year. “…It was to see to it that if they were going to be called on to help protect the community, it gave them some legal authority and protection to do that.”
The Larimer County Sheriff’s Office is one of just a couple of agencies in Colorado that include both certified reserve officers and uncertified volunteers on their posse. In the majority of agencies, the reserve unit is separate from the posse, or the posse is made up entirely of certified reserves.
POST-certified reserve officers can do anything that paid police officers can do, as long as they are being supervised by a fully POST-certified officer, said Col. Ronald Abramson, chief of the Colorado Rangers, an organization of about 100 reserve police officers that provides the volunteer officers to about three dozen law enforcement agencies across the state.
The agencies, including the Denver Police Department, pay a subscription fee to the Colorado Rangers — which the rangers, who are unpaid, use for equipment, insurance and training — and in return, the agencies can call in volunteer rangers for extra manpower as needed.
“Most of what we do is pre-planned, like a Denver Broncos game or CU football games, large city events, but we also fill in when police departments are low on officers, or if small departments have officers who get sick and can’t work,” Abramson said.
After the Marshall fire in 2021, rangers patrolled the burned neighborhoods in Boulder County for six months, he said.
Decline in reserve officers
Abramson suspects the decrease in statewide reserve officers might be because agencies are relying more on the Colorado Rangers. It is expensive for agencies to run their own reserve program, he noted, and they are often limited to a handful of reserve officers.
“Of all our agencies we work with, I don’t think any of them have reserve programs anymore,” he said. “They use us as their reserves. I can surge almost 100 reserve officers to any agency if I need to.”
But several leaders in sheriff’s offices also pointed to 2020 police reform — particularly the changes under Senate Bill 217 that allowed police officers to be held personally liable for up to $25,000 in damages under certain conditions — as a reason for the decrease in reserve officers.
“As a volunteer, a person who doesn’t get a dime out of it, you have the same level of liability, and that would, in my opinion, drive down the number of people,” Smith speculated, calling the law a “great deterrent.”
In Logan County, Undersheriff Dennis Aulston said the 2020 reform and a general lack of interest in volunteering drove the sheriff’s office to shut down its long-standing posse in 2021.
“A lot of our posse members had gotten older,” he said. “We had had one for years and years. There just wasn’t the interest in that like we were having. We had a few younger guys, but not enough. And then when that Senate bill came out, we just couldn’t be putting people in that predicament.”
Generally, interest in police jobs has waned in recent years, as has interest in volunteering of all types, Smith said.
For the Colorado Rangers, where all rangers carry reserve officer POST certifications, Abramson has no problem attracting volunteers, but he is limited by rising costs.
“Many paid police officers will tell you that they barely do the job because they get a paycheck and they can’t imagine anybody doing the job not getting paid,” he said. “We take that as a compliment. It is a very tough job.”
Insurance costs for the rangers’ reserve officers increased 64% from 2022 to 2024, which Abramson said is likely tied to recent large jury verdicts in civil cases against police officers.
“We have to be judicious in the number of rangers we can bring into the program, because the cost of each ranger is so high with insurance, body cameras and training costs,” he noted.
In El Paso County, the sheriff’s reserve unit dropped from more than 30 reserve officers to about a dozen, which Sgt. Kurt Smith attributed to the extensive training that is required for a reserve POST certification.
“It just requires so many hours of training; someone doesn’t have the ability to take that much time off their normal work, and their normal job,” he said. The sheriff’s office reserves are now largely retired law enforcement officers who want to volunteer, rather than active professionals with other jobs, he said.
In Eagle County, Avon police Cmdr. Ken Dammen runs one of just a handful of reserve officer academies in the state. The police department hosted its first class — two paramedics and a local surgeon — in 2018 so that the three medical providers could carry guns while they were deployed with the region’s special operations police team.
Dammen has run one academy every three years since — the minimum frequency to maintain his standing with POST — meeting for one full weekday each week over two semesters. The last two academies have each graduated one new reserve officer, he said. Four other people dropped out before the end of classes, he said.
“It was just either scheduling wasn’t going to work out for them or they decided they didn’t want to do it,” he said. “That is the difficulty with reserves in general. It is volunteer… So at the end of the day, if they choose at any point they don’t want to do it, or it’s too much, or I have other things I want to do, there’s not a whole lot you can do to keep them.”
A brand new posse
In June, the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office relaunched its posse in part to boost the ranks of volunteers and bridge the gap left by the lower number of reserve officers.
The first class of about 25 posse members graduated from the sheriff’s roughly five-week training course in June. The class met for four hours twice a week on weeknights and for several hours on Saturdays. The training covered the basics of traffic control, radio use, policies and procedures, said Hayley Suppes, volunteer coordinator at the sheriff’s office.
“They are not POST-certified, they don’t have powers of arrest, they don’t carry weapons beyond OC spray,” Suppes said, referring to pepper spray used to incapacitate suspects. “They are meant to be a force multiplier for our deputies in the field, whether that is running security for an event, traffic control, extra eyes or help on the radio.”
The office asked the posse members to give at least 80 hours a year in volunteered time, and most have already exceeded that, Suppes said. The sheriff’s office is now recruiting for a second posse class.
Posse member Mark Shuster has put in 104 hours so far, he said. He joined the posse in part because his son works for the sheriff’s office, and because he was looking for a way to contribute to the community after he retired from the military.
“Sometimes it is hard to scratch that itch,” he said.
He’s volunteered with deputies at football games, helped with intakes at the jail and assisted with traffic control. The posse wears maroon uniforms — a different color from deputies — and members do not carry guns. Shuster hasn’t yet been called out to a larger-scale emergency, like a wildfire, but he’s ready to go if needed.
“If I’m available, I will drop everything… and I will go report for duty,” he said. “Because that is the commitment I made. But the good news as a volunteer is, if you can’t show up, they’re not going to give you any grief, because you don’t work for the sheriff’s office.”
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