DENVER — Broomfield freshman Bella Barajas was conflicted at the state wrestling tournament Saturday evening.
Standing inside the tunnels at Ball Arena, now in street clothes, she beamed when asked about her sister, Shayla Martinez, the early headlining champion who had just won her second straight 5A girls 190-pound title.
As for Barajas’ own tournament — where she’d placed sixth at 170 pounds — her face momentarily fell before finding some consolation.
DENVER — Broomfield’s Shayla Martinez caps a perfect season, winning her second straight state title at 5A girls 190 pounds at Ball Arena on Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026. (Photo by Brent W. New/BoCoPreps)
“She placed (on the podium) her first season, and then went on to win twice,” Barajas said of Martinez. “I want to be wrestling for the top of the podium next year with her. I want to follow in her footsteps.”
Barajas eventually caved and said she was proud of herself for making the podium in her first season. But she was more interested in talking about her sister — the athlete and mentor.
Big sister was listening in.
“She wants to follow in my footsteps, I heard her say,” Martinez said as she shook her head and smiled, watching Barajas as she disappeared into the distance. “I want her to create her own footsteps for other people to follow and look up to.”
Martinez then paused. For the first time since winning gold Saturday, her eyes welled up with tears.
“My sister — she’s a hard worker,” Martinez continued. “She’s a three-sport athlete. I want her to keep her head up high. I’m so proud of her.”
Of course, Martinez would characterize the joy of winning her second straight state title largely through the fact that she got to wrestle on the same team as her sister.
But she could’ve framed it in many ways: like the fact that she called her shot to repeat an entire year ago, before she’d even left Ball Arena after last season’s state tournament.
This winter, she went on to declare that winning a second straight state title wouldn’t be enough — it needed to be on the back of an undefeated campaign.
“So last year she had one loss,” Broomfield first-year girls wrestling coach Luci Schement said last month when she was told Martinez put her undefeated goal in the public sphere. “And so this year, she wanted to come back better.”
Martinez never wavered. She finished a perfect 40-0 as a junior, registering 34 pins — 12 of which came inside the first 30 seconds of the match.
At the state tournament, she pinned everyone, sticking Loveland’s Abigail Stearns in the exact same time as she did in last year’s final — 63 seconds.
With her hand raised in victory Saturday, Martinez put up two fingers to signify the repeat.
She needed a few more to count all of the people she said helped her reach this moment.
She thanked the Broomfield boys team, whom she wrestled with, along with the girls team, during the season.
She highlighted the Eagles community and the one at Brighton High School, her training grounds during the offseason. (She even donned a half-and-half sweatshirt split between Broomfield and Brighton High School before and after her finals match.)
“Matilda Hruby,” Martinez said, naming Brighton’s 155-pound girls wrestler, who’d later wrestle in the night’s most anticipated match. Hruby was attempting to win her third title against Pomona’s Timberly Martinez, who was eyeing her fourth.
“I’ve been working with her for a long time and she really pushed me to be the best version of myself,” she added. “She got me here. I’m not going to lie.”
Martinez — who attends Monarch High — then cracked a wry smile, “I want to be like Matilda but create my own path, you know?”
That’s right. Even on her biggest day in the sport, Martinez couldn’t go long without thinking of her younger sister.
“She’s young. She’s our baby,” Martinez said. “I told her to keep her head up high and move forward. Like, ‘You’re still a champion in my eyes.’”
As for Martinez herself?
Well, she called her shot. Again.
“I’m coming for it all,” she said. “I meet hard opponents outside of Colorado, but I want to be the best, so I’m going to do whatever it takes. I want to be the best. I want to be big — something big.”
DENVER — Broomfield’s Shayla Martinez runs to hug her father Sam Barajas after capping a perfect season by winning her second straight state title at 5A girls 190 pounds at Ball Arena on Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026. (Photo by Brent W. New/BoCoPreps)
DENVER — Broomfield’s Shayla Martinez caps a perfect season, winning her second straight state title at 5A girls 190 pounds at Ball Arena on Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026. (Photo by Brent W. New/BoCoPreps)
Broomfield’s Shayla Martinez capped a perfect season by winning her second straight state title in the Class 5A 190-pound bracket Saturday night at Ball Arena in Denver. (Brent W. New/BoCoPreps.com)
DENVER — Broomfield’s Shayla Martinez caps a perfect season, winning her second straight state title at 5A girls 190 pounds at Ball Arena on Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026. (Photo by Brent W. New/BoCoPreps)
DENVER — Broomfield’s Shayla Martinez caps a perfect season, winning her second straight state title at 5A girls 190 pounds at Ball Arena on Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026. (Photo by Brent W. New/BoCoPreps)
DENVER — Broomfield’s Shayla Martinez caps a perfect season, winning her second straight state title at 5A girls 190 pounds at Ball Arena on Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026. (Photo by Brent W. New/BoCoPreps)
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DENVER — Broomfield’s Shayla Martinez runs to hug her father Sam Barajas after capping a perfect season by winning her second straight state title at 5A girls 190 pounds at Ball Arena on Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026. (Photo by Brent W. New/BoCoPreps)
There are just 16 Flock Safety cameras in Thornton.
But those electronic eyes, mounted to poles at intersections throughout this city of nearly 150,000, brought out dozens of people to the Thornton Community Center for a discussion on how the controversial license plate-reading cameras are being used — and whether they should be used at all.
Law enforcement agencies cite the automatic license-plate readers, or ALPRs, as a powerful tool that bolsters their ability to locate and stop suspects who may be on their way to committing their next assault or robbery.
But Meg Moore, a six-year resident of the city who is helping spearhead opposition to Flock cameras, said she worries about how the rapidly spreading surveillance system is impacting residents’ privacy and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Thornton’s Flock camera data can be seen by more than 1,600 other law enforcement agencies across the country.
“We want to make sure this is truly safe and effective,” she said in an interview.
The debate over Atlanta-based Flock Safety’s cameras, which not only can record license plate numbers but can search for the specific characteristics of a vehicle linked to an alleged crime, has been picking up steam in recent years. The discussions have largely played out in metro Denver and Front Range cities in recent months, but this year they reached the state Capitol, where lawmakers are pitching a couple of bills to tighten up rules around surveillance.
In Denver, Mayor Mike Johnston has been butting heads with the City Council over the issue. Johnston is so convinced of Flock’s value in combating crime that in October, he extended the contract with the company against the wishes of much of the council. Denver has 111 Flock cameras.
In Longmont, elected leaders took a different approach. Its City Council voted in December to pause all sharing of Flock Safety data with other municipalities, declined an expansion of its contract with the company and began searching for an alternative.
Louisville beat its Boulder County neighbor to the punch by several months, disabling its Flock cameras at the end of June and removing them by the start of October. City spokesman Derek Cosson said privacy concerns from residents largely drove the city’s decision.
Steve Mathias, a Thornton resident for nearly a decade, would like to see Flock’s cameras gone from his city. Short of that, he said, reliable controls on how the streetside data is collected, stored and shared are paramount.
“In our rush to make our community safe, we’re not getting the full picture of the risks we’re facing,” he said. “We’re making ourselves safe in some ways by making ourselves less safe in others.”
The hot-button debate in Thornton played out at last month’s community meeting and continued at a City Council meeting last week, where the city’s Police Department gave a presentation on the Flock system.
Cmdr. Chad Parker laid out several examples of Flock’s cameras being instrumental in apprehending bad actors — in cases ranging from homicide to sex assault to child exploitation to a $5,700 theft at a Nike store.
As recently as Monday, Thornton police announced on X that investigators had tracked down a man suspected of hitting and killing a 14-year-old boy who was riding a small motorized bike over the weekend. The agency said a Flock camera in Thornton gave officers a “strong lead” in identifying the hit-and-run suspect within 24 hours.
At the Feb. 3 council study session, police Chief Jim Baird described Flock’s camera system as “one of the best tools I’ve seen in 32 years of law enforcement.”
But that doesn’t sway those in Thornton who are wary of the camera network.
“I’m not a fan of building toward a surveillance state,” Mathias said.
The hazards of a system like Flock, he said, lie not just in the pervasive data-collection methods the company uses but also in who eventually might get to see and use that data — be it a rogue law enforcement officer or a hacker who manages to break into Flock’s database.
“A person who wants us to do us harm with this system will have as much capability as the police have to do good,” he said.
A Flock Safety license plate recognition camera is seen on a street light post on Ken Pratt Boulevard near the intersection with U.S. 287 in Longmont on Dec. 10, 2025. (Matthew Jonas/Daily Camera)
Crime-fighting tool or prone to misuse?
In November, a Columbine Valley police officer was disciplined after he accused a Denver woman of theft based in large part on evidence from Flock cameras, according to reporting from Fox31. The officer mistakenly claimed the woman had stolen a $25 package in a nearby town and said he’d used Flock cameras to track her car.
“It’s putting too much trust in the hands of people who don’t know what they’re doing,” DeFlock’s Will Freeman said of so many police agencies’ adoption of the technology.
Last summer, 9News reported that the Loveland Police Department had shared access to its Flock camera system with U.S. Border Patrol. That came two months after the station reported that the department gave the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives access to its account, which ATF agents then used to conduct searches for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Parker, the Thornton police commander, said any searches connected to immigration cases or to women from out of state who are seeking an abortion in Colorado — another scenario that’s been raised — “won’t ever touch our system.” State laws restrict cooperation with federal immigration authorities and with other states’ abortion-related investigations.
“Any situation I feel uncomfortable about or that might be in conflict with our policies or with Colorado law, I will revoke their access — no problem,” he said.
Thornton deputy city attorney Adam Stephens said motorists’ Fourth Amendment rights are not being violated by the city’s Flock camera network. During last week’s meeting, he cited several recent court cases that, in essence, determined that there is no right to privacy while driving down a public roadway.
In an interview, Stephens said Thornton was “in compliance with the law.”
Flock spokesman Paris Lewbel wrote in an email that the company was “proud to partner with the Thornton Police Department to provide technology used to investigate and solve crimes and to help locate missing persons.”
Lewbel provided links to two news stories about minor children who were abducted and then found with the help of Flock’s cameras in Thornton and elsewhere.
At the council’s study session last week, Parker provided more examples of Flock’s role in fighting crime and finding missing people in Thornton. They included police nabbing a suspect who had hit and killed a pedestrian, locating a burglar who was suspected of robbing several dispensaries, and tracking down an 89-year-old man with dementia who had gotten into his car and gotten lost.
“It allows us to find vehicles in a manner we weren’t able to previously,” Parker said of the camera network.
Thornton installed its first 10 Flock cameras in 2022 and then added five more — plus a mobile unit — two years later. The initial deployment was in response to a spike in auto thefts in the city, which peaked at 1,205 in 2022 (amid an overall surge in Colorado). Thornton recorded 536 auto thefts last year.
The city says Flock cameras have been involved in 200 cases that resulted in an arrest or a warrant application in Thornton over the last three years.
Thornton police have access to nearly 2,200 other agencies’ Flock systems across the United States, while nearly 1,650 law enforcement agencies can access Thornton’s Flock data, according to data provided by the city.
For Anaya Robinson, the public policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, the networked nature of Flock cameras across wide geographies is a big part of the problem. By linking one police agency’s Flock technology with that of thousands of other police departments, it “creates a surveillance environment that could violate the Fourth Amendment.”
The sweeping nature of Flock’s surveillance is also worrisome, Robinson said.
“You’re not just collecting the data of vehicles that ping (a police department’s) hot list (of suspicious vehicles), you’re collecting the data of every vehicle that is caught on a Flock camera,” he said.
And because the technology is relatively inexpensive — Thornton pays $48,500 to Flock annually for its system — it’s an affordable crime-fighting tool for most communities. But that doesn’t mean it should be deployed, DeFlock’s Freeman said.
Fight remains a largely local one
State lawmakers are crafting bills this session to limit the reach of surveillance technologies like Flock’s.
Senate Bill 70 would put limits on access to databases and the sharing of information. It would prohibit a government from accessing a database that reveals an individual’s or a vehicle’s historical location information, and it would prohibit sharing that information with third parties or with government agencies outside the controlling entity’s jurisdiction. Certain exceptions would apply.
Senate Bill 71 would direct a “law enforcement agency to use surveillance technology only for lawful purposes directly related to public safety or for an active investigation.” It also would forbid the use of facial-recognition technology without a warrant and would place limits on the amount of time data can be retained.
Both bills await their first committee hearings.
Thornton says it doesn’t use facial recognition technology. Its Flock data is retained for 30 days.
Regardless of what passes at the state Capitol, the real fight over license plate readers of any type will likely continue to happen at the local level. Thornton’s council plans further discussions on Flock next month.
For Moore, the resident who is leading the charge against the cameras, potential surveillance of the immigrant community is what troubles her the most.
“We want to make sure we’re operating this so that it’s safe for all of our residents,” she said. “Getting rid of the cameras altogether is a tough sell. But there needs to be a conversation about guardrails.”
Mayor Pro Tem Roberta Ayala, a Thornton native, said she has heard a wide array of opinions from her constituents about the advantages and potential downsides of the technology.
“Could it be misused? Yes. Do we want to stop that? Yes,” she said.
But as a victim of crime herself, Ayala also knows the immense damage and disruption that crime causes victims and their families, be it a stolen vehicle or something much worse. And as a teacher, Ayala is concerned about achieving justice for the families of children who are harmed or abused.
“If it can save even five kids,” she said, “I want the cameras.”
A former Arvada teacher arrested Monday for reportedly creating and selling child sexual assault material was found to have violated St. Vrain Valley School District policies in 2023 for interactions he had with students at Erie Middle School, and officials recommended the teacher not return to the district.
That finding was not shared with Jefferson County School District when it hired the teacher, according to an arrest affidavit.
SVVSD officials said Wednesday that they were evaluating whether they could fire the teacher, 39-year-old Patricio Alejandro Illanes, when he resigned in late 2023.
Illanes faces 40 counts of sexual exploitation of a child in addition to 10 counts of unlawful practice of occupation or profession, according to a Boulder County Sheriff’s Office release.
Illanes reportedly photographed or took videos of at least 10 students at four different schools or youth program locations, including Centaurus High School, New Meridian High School and Erie Middle School, over the course of nine years, according to an arrest affidavit.
In 2023, a school employee reported to an Erie police school resource officer that he had overheard a 14-year-old boy describe an interaction he had with Illanes to another student.
The boy said Illanes had asked him to stay after class to help him with a video project, and the boy agreed, according to the affidavit. Illanes then instructed the boy to remove his shirt and shoes and pretend to be a lifeguard. The student said Illanes told him that he would pretend to chloroform him and instructed the student to pretend to be knocked out.
When Erie police interviewed Illanes, he “provided a similar story” but said he never touched the students inappropriately and that their shirts remained on, according to the affidavit. Illanes gave police the videos he had recorded, which showed the interaction described by the student, but with the student wearing a lifeguard shirt over a long-sleeve shirt.
Two other minors later told police Illanes asked them to help him with a project, then videotaped or photographed them in costumes.
In an October 2025 interview with police, Illanes said he did not use the videos for sexual gratification and understood the incident was “not an appropriate thing,” according to the affidavit.
The Erie police criminal investigation into the incident was “unfounded,” according to the affidavit.
An SVVSD internal investigation found that Illanes had violated district policies and recommended that he “not return” to Erie Middle School or any school in the district.
Illanes resigned in December that year. He was hired to work at Arvada Senior High School in 2024.
When Illanes resigned, SVVSD was evaluating whether it had “sufficient grounds” under state teacher employment laws to fire him, according to Kerri McDermid, the district’s chief of staff and strategic priorities.
Jefferson County School District officials told police they never received the SVVSD internal investigation report, and had they known about it, they wouldn’t have hired Illanes, the affidavit stated.
SVVSD officials told police Jeffco officials had not asked for the report and that they had been served a court document restricting them from sharing it, but did not provide the court document to police, according to the affidavit.
McDermid said the SVVSD human resources department and Illanes’ former supervisor at Erie Middle School do not have a record of receiving a reference or information request from Jeffco officials until October 2025. At that time, the district provided the information they were allowed to disclose under law, she said.
In a windowless room at Denver police headquarters on a recent Thursday afternoon, Officer Chris Velarde activated a police drone to investigate a potential car break-in.
Officer Chris Velarde flies a drone and monitors live footage from its camera from Denver Police Department headquarters on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
Several floors above, the drone launched from the roof and flew itself — essentially on autopilot — to the site of the call, reported as a man breaking into a car with a crowbar near the Santa Fe Arts District.
The drone whizzed along, 200 feet up, in a straight line across blocks, buildings and streets during the roughly mile-long flight from police headquarters at 1331 Cherokee St. Velarde didn’t pick up the Xbox video-game controller that manually pilots the drone until it reached the area of the call. Then he took control and trolled the block for the supposed break-in, watching live video footage transmitted from the drone on his computer monitor as he flew.
After a few moments, Velarde spotted two people jiggering the passenger-side window of a vehicle. He zoomed in on the pair, and on the car’s license plate. He ran the plate to see whether the vehicle was stolen; it was not. The people on the street didn’t look up. They didn’t seem to know a police drone was hovering above them, that they were being recorded and watched a mile away by officers and a reporter.
Two more people joined the pair at the vehicle’s window and Velarde made the call — this didn’t look like a vehicle break-in. More likely, someone had just locked their keys in their car. He cleared the call with 911 dispatchers and told them there was no need to send an officer to the scene. Then he sent the drone back to headquarters; it flew itself to the rooftop dock, landing autonomously on a platform stamped with bright blue-and-yellow QR codes.
The Denver Police Department began testing drones as first responders — that is, sending them out on 911 calls — in mid-October after signing up for two free pilot programs from rival drone companies Skydio and Flock Safety. The effort has raised concerns among privacy advocates, Denver politicians and the city’s police oversight group, particularly regarding the department’s contract with Flock, the company behind the city’s controversial network of automated license-plate readers.
Police see the drones as a way to speed up call-response times and provide more information to officers as they arrive on scene, improving, they say, both public safety and officer safety. If a drone arrives at a scene before officers, and the drone pilot can tell police on the ground that the man with the knife actually put down the weapon before the officers arrived, that helps everyone, police said.
“The more knowledge, information and intelligence that we can provide our officers on the ground, the better methods that they can use to respond to certain situations, which may cause them to not escalate unnecessarily,” said Cmdr. Clifford Barnes, who heads the department’s Cyber Bureau.
Critics say the eyes in the sky raise serious privacy concerns both with how the drones and the data they collect are used now, and with how they might be used in the future as the technology rapidly changes. They worry that the drones could create a citywide surveillance network with few legal guardrails, that the footage they collect will be used to train private companies’ AI algorithms or that police will misuse emerging AI capabilities, like facial recognition.
“When it comes to the decision of, are we going to use this thing that could potentially increase public safety, that will erode privacy rights — no one should get to decide the public is willing to give away our constitutional rights, except the people,” said Anaya Robinson, public policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado. “And when law enforcement makes that decision for us, it becomes extremely problematic.”
Almost 300 drone flights in 55 days
So far, only Skydio drones have flown as first responders over Denver.
Denver police signed a zero-dollar contract with Flock — without public announcement — in August for a year-long pilot of drones as first responders, but the company has yet to set up its autonomous aircraft. Skydio, on the other hand, moved quickly to get drones in the air after Denver police in October signed a contract to test up to four of the company’s drones during a free six-month pilot.
Skydio’s drones can reach about a 2-mile radius around the Denver police headquarters. The company advertises a top speed of 45 mph with 40 minutes of flight time; Denver pilots have found the drones average around 28 mph and around 25 minutes of battery life per flight.
From the first flight on Oct. 15 through Tuesday, two Skydio drones flew 297 times, according to data provided by Denver police in response to an open records request. Most of those flights — 199 — were to answer calls for service; another 82 were training flights, according to the data.
Skydio drones also surveilled events — a function police call “event overwatch” — seven times, the police data shows. Overwatch might include flying over a protest to track where the demonstrators are headed and alert officers on the ground for traffic control, Barnes said. (The police data showed that all seven overwatch flights occurred on Oct. 18, the day of Denver’s “No Kings” rally.)
The drones flew to 29 calls about a person with a weapon, 21 disturbances, 20 assaults in progress, a dozen suspicious occurrences and 11 hold-up alarms, according to data from Denver’s 911 dispatch records. The drones also flew to 39 other types of calls, including reports of prowlers, fights, burglaries, domestic violence and suicidal people.
The most common outcome for a call was that the officers were unable to locate an incident or the suspect was gone by the time the drone or police officers arrived, the records show. Across about 200 calls for service that included drone responses, police made 22 arrests and issued one citation, the dispatch data shows.
When responding to calls for service, the drones reached the scene before patrol officers 88% of the time, the police data shows. A drone was the sole police response in 80 of 199 calls for service, or about 40% of the time.
Barnes said answering calls with solely a drone improves police efficiency.
“If an officer on the ground doesn’t need to respond, and the drone pilot is comfortable with cancelling the other officers coming, we can assign those officers to more important, more pressing matters, so call-response times come down,” he said.
That approach raises questions about what the drones (which are equipped with three different cameras and a thermal imager) can and can’t see, and how officers are making decisions about call responses without actually speaking to anyone at the scene, the ACLU’s Robinson said.
“Humans have bias,” he said. Drone pilots might be more inclined to send officers to a potential car break-in in a low-income neighborhood and more likely not to in a higher-income neighborhood, he said. Or they might miss something from above that they could have seen at street level.
Officer Chris Velarde flies a drone and monitors live footage from its camera from Denver Police Department headquarters on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
But minimizing in-person police interactions with residents, particularly in over-policed neighborhoods, can also be a positive, said Julia Richman, chair of Denver’s Citizen Oversight Board, which provides civilian oversight of the police department.
“Where my head goes is the other outcome, where they roll up on those people who are trying to get keys out of the car and then they shoot them,” she said. “Actually, (the drone-only response) seems like a really good outcome.”
The oversight group has talked with Denver police over the last two years about developing its drone program, she said. The department created a seven-page policy to guide their use; the policy aims to ensure “civil rights and reasonable expectations of privacy are a key component of any decision made to deploy” a drone.
But Richman said she was surprised by aspects of the police department’s pilot programs despite the ongoing conversations with department leadership.
“What was never discussed, not once, was the idea of a third party running those drones or those drones being autonomous,” she said, referring to the drone companies. “What has changed with this latest pilot is the key features and key aspects that would create public concern had never been discussed with us.”
Both Flock and Skydio advertise autonomous features powered by artificial intelligence. Skydio uses AI for its autonomous flight paths, obstacle avoidance and tracking people and cars.
Flock, which also offers autonomous flight, advertises its drones as integrating with its automated license-plate readers. The license-plate readers — there are more than 100 around Denver — automatically photograph every car that passes by them. If a license plate is stolen or involved in a crime, the license-plate readers alert police within seconds.
Police Chief Ron Thomas and Mayor Mike Johnston defended the surveillance network as an invaluable crime-solving tool this year against mounting public discontent around how much data the machines collected and how that data was used — particularly around sharing information with the federal government for the purposes of immigration enforcement.
That privacy debate around Flock’s license plate readers unfolded in communities across Colorado and nationwide this year. In Loveland, the police department for a time allowed U.S. Border Patrol agents to access its Flock cameras before blocking that access. In Longmont, councilmembers voted Wednesday to look for alternatives to replace the 20 Flock license plate readers in that city.
When Denver City Council members, some driven by privacy concerns, voted against continuing Flock’s license-plate readers in May, Johnston extended the surveillance anyway through a free five-month contract extension with Flock in October that did not require approval from the council. Against that backdrop, Denver police quietly signed on for Flock’s drone pilot in August.
Barnes said the police department will not use any license-plate reader capabilities available on Flock drones. Such a feature would constitute “random surveillance,” which is prohibited under the department’s drone policy. The drones never fly without an officer’s direct involvement, he added.
The blue 2-mile-radius line seen on a computer screen shows the range of Denver police Skydio drones flown from Denver Police headquarters. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
The policy also prohibits drones from filming anywhere a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy unless police have a warrant, and says officers should take “reasonable precautions … to avoid inadvertently recording or transmitting images of areas where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
Denver police do receive search warrants to fly drones for particular operations outside of the drones-as-first-responder program. In October, a Denver police detective sought and received a warrant to fly a drone over a shooting suspect’s home in Cherry Hills Village to check whether a truck involved in the shooting was parked at the wooded property.
The warrant noted that when driving home from anywhere outside Cherry Hills Village, the suspect could not reach his house without passing by Flock license-plate readers, and that photos from those license-plate readers suggested the truck was at the property.
Denver Councilwoman Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez and Councilman Kevin Flynn both told The Post they were not aware of the police department’s Skydio drone pilot before hearing about it from the newspaper, even though they are both on the city’s Surveillance Technology Task Force. The new group began meeting in August largely to consider Flock license-plate readers, as well as other types of surveillance technology, Gonzales-Gutierrez said.
“We haven’t talked about it in the task force, and the charge of our work in the task force is to come up with those guardrails that need to be put in place for these types of technology being utilized by law enforcement,” she said. “I feel like they just keep moving on without us being able to complete our work.”
Police don’t need permission from the City Council to carry out the pilot programs, Gonzales-Gutierrez said, but she was disappointed by the lack of communication and collaboration from the department.
Flynn sees the potential of police drones, particularly in speeding up officer response times, which can sometimes be dismal in the far-flung areas of his southwestern district.
“If a drone can get there to a 911 call and it can help an officer at headquarters assess the scene before a staffed car could get there, I would love that,” he said.
But he wants to be sure they are used in a way that respects residents’ rights. He would not support using the drones for general patrolling or surveillance, he said.
“This pilot is an excellent opportunity to test all of those boundaries and see if there are ways to operate a system that can be very useful for public safety without crossing boundaries,” he said.”…And maybe we don’t keep using them. That is the point of a pilot.”
‘These are flying cops’
The Skydio drones film from the moment they are launched until they drop in to land.
When the drone is on its way to a call — flying at the 200-foot altitude limit set by the Federal Aviation Administration — its cameras remain pointed at the horizon. In Denver’s denser neighborhoods, the Skydio drones at that height flew among buildings, sometimes at eye-level with balconies, offices and apartment windows, according to video of four flights obtained by The Post through an open records request.
“What if someone is in their apartment unit in one of these giant buildings and they’re changing, and they have their window open because they’re way up high and they don’t think anyone is watching them?” Gonzales-Gutierrez said. “That is crazy.”
The drones buzzed over rooftop decks, balconies and elevated apartment complex pools, the videos show. On one trip, a drone flew past the Colorado State Capitol Building, recording three people on a balcony on the tower under the building’s golden dome. Another time, the drone pilot zoomed in on a license plate so tightly that the car’s small, decorative “LOVE” decal was clearly visible.
Flynn noted that a 200-foot altitude would put the drones well above most of the homes in his less-dense district, and that people on their porches or balconies aren’t somewhere private.
“If someone is out on a balcony, sitting there reading a book… generally speaking, if you are out in public there’s no expectation of privacy,” he said.
The Skydio drones recorded about 54 hours of footage in the first eight weeks of their operation, according to data provided by the police department. Police leadership opted to have the drones’ cameras on and recording whenever the drone is in flight to boost transparency about how the drones are being used, Barnes said.
“It makes sense to keep the camera rolling,” Barnes said. “Then, if there’s an allegation, we just make sure that footage is recorded and treated like digital evidence, uploaded to the evidence management platform so it could be reviewed as necessary. We’re just trying to make sure we establish that balance, being as transparent as possible.”
Drone footage unrelated to criminal investigations is automatically deleted after 60 days, he said. While it’s retained, it’s stored in an evidence system that keeps a record of anyone who looks at it. The drone unit’s sergeant, Brent Kohls, also audits the flight reports monthly. (Footage used in criminal investigations will be on the same retention schedule as body-worn camera footage, police said.)
Kohls noted it would be unusual for the drone footage to be viewed only by the pilot. The feed is often displayed on the wall of the police department’s Real-Time Crime Center as it comes in.
ACLU attorney Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the organization’s speech, privacy and technology project, would rather see police keep the recording off while flying a drone to a call, even if the camera is still livestreaming to police headquarters. In that scenario, a drone pilot might still see a woman tanning topless on her rooftop pool deck, he said, but the government wouldn’t then keep a recording of that privacy violation, amplifying it further.
“The thing we are really worried about is police start deploying drones as first responders for the majority of their calls for service and suddenly you have this crisscrossing network of surveillance all over the city,” Freed Wessler said. “You have the potential for a pervasive record of what everyone is doing all the time.”
Kohls said an officer flying a drone who spotted a different crime occurring while en route to another call would stop to report and respond to that secondary crime, just like an officer would on the ground.
“Absolutely, if an officer sees a crime happening, they’re going to get on the radio, alert dispatch to what they’re observing,” Kohls said. “Hopefully, if they have a few minutes of battery time left still, they can extend their time and circle or overwatch on that scene to provide hopefully life-saving radio traffic, whatever information they need to relay to dispatch to get other officers heading, or the fire department heading that way.”
State and federal laws have not yet caught up to how police are using drones, Freed Wessler said. The Fourth Amendment has what’s known as the plain-view exception, which allows police officers who are lawfully in a place to take action if they see evidence of a crime happening in plain sight.
“The problem here is we are not talking about police doing a thing we would normally expect them to do,” Freed Wessler said. “We are talking about police taking advantage of a new technology that gives them a totally new power to fly at virtually no expense over any part of the city at any time of day and see a whole bunch of stuff happening.”
A Denver police drone lands on its docking station on the roof of Denver Police headquarters in Denver, on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
Police have broad leeway to watch suspects without first getting a search warrant — like by peering through a fence or climbing the steps of a nearby building to look into a yard. But that’s different from using a subtle video camera to record a person 24/7 for months, the justices concluded.
So far, that’s the closest ruling in Colorado on the issue of drone surveillance, Freed Wessler said. Robinson, the policy director at the ACLU of Colorado, said lawmakers should act to regulate police drone use — either at the state or local level.
“These are flying cops,” said Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital privacy. “That is another one of those slippery slopes.”
Aside from the legality of surveillance, another question is how the drone footage and flight data is used by the drone companies, Lipton said.
“We live in a time where all these AI-fueled companies have a real drive to integrate AI into everything, and they’re really hungry for new data,” she said. “And we have law enforcement helping to feed these companies in a way they don’t really understand.”
Under its current agreement with Denver police, Skydio doesn’t use drone footage to train its algorithm or improve its product. Flock spells out in its contract that the company can “collect, analyze and anonymize” drone footage, then use that anonymized footage to train its “machine learning algorithms,” and enhance its services.
Lipton added that technology is moving fast — Axon, a company that powers many police departments’ body-worn cameras — this month started testing facial recognition on its cameras to automatically alert a police officer if a person they’re encountering has a warrant out for their arrest.
Prisons are experimenting with “movement analysis” to automatically flag a person’s movements as potentially aggressive before the person perpetrates violence, she said.
“We are technologically at a place where it would not be hard for a drone to fly over an area and basically serve as a license-plate reader for humans,” Lipton said. “… Some of this analysis is just not being done because it is not publicly palatable yet. But it is not like it is technologically difficult for some of these companies.”
Now, 70 years later, Philip Bearly remembers the explosion “like it was yesterday.” Bearly, who was 5 ½ years old at the time, remembers driving to his grandmother’s birthday celebration at 17th Street and Main Street in Longmont when he saw a flash.
“… it was as bright as daylight,” Bearly said in an interview.
The DC-6B aircraft leaving Denver exploded on Nov. 1, 1955, when a dynamite bomb went off 11 minutes into the flight. The plane’s wreckage landed below on more than 6 square miles of beet fields in the Longmont area. The explosion killed 44 people on board, becoming the deadliest act of mass murder in Colorado history.
Nearly 400 Weld County residents sprang into action to search for survivors and protect the bodies from looters until authorities arrived.
In May 1956, a jury found 23-year-old Jack Graham guilty of the crime as he had placed explosives in his mother’s luggage before she boarded the flight. Investigators determined Graham sought to cash in on a $37,500 insurance policy on his mother’s life. Graham was executed in January 1957.
Page 1 of the Nov. 2, 1955, Longmont Times-Call
Philip Bearly, a 5-year-old first responder
“For a dumb, little 5 ½-year-old kid, I remember that like it was yesterday,” Bearly said.
After his family saw the plane explode, Bearly’s father, Clayton, immediately took the family to the scene of the incident.
“Something terrible has happened,” Bearly, now 75, remembers his dad saying. “They’re going to need help.”
Upon arrival, Bearly, his mother, older brother and younger sister all sat in the car, headlights shining on the wreckage. Clayton was in the fields keeping looters out of the wreckage.
A law enforcement friend of Clayton’s gave him a spare gun at the crash scene. That officer posted him at the corner of one of the sites and told him to tell folks he had orders to shoot looters.
Bearly and his family didn’t get home until about 1:30 a.m. that night.
Over the two days that followed, Clayton, who managed the nearby truck stop Johnson’s Corner, cooked as many meals as he and his staff could to feed the first responders. The National Guard arrived a few days later to take over feeding responders.
To this day, Bearly has a letter the Colorado State Patrol head wrote his dad back on Nov. 22, 1955, thanking him for his help.
Seventy years later, Bearly wants Coloradans and Americans alike to know about Flight 629, its impact and its history. He also wants people to honor the 44 victims and the many first responders — including his dad — who didn’t hesitate to lend a hand to those in need.
“As Americans, that’s what we do. We help each other,” he said. “Don’t hesitate. Step up and help. Be a part of the solution.”
Bearly, who lives in Campion, also hopes to see a memorial on the land where the plane crashed, commemorating the lives lost and those who helped. He has worked with the nonprofit Flight 629 Memorial and hopes that it meets its goal of opening a monument to the flight on its 75th anniversary in Firestone.
Conrad Hopp, whose family farm became a crash site
Conrad Hopp, 88, still struggles to talk about the aftermath of Flight 629 crashing in his family’s fields outside Firestone.
“We didn’t have time to feel how it felt,” Hopp said in an interview.
Hopp was 18 years old when debris from Flight 629 landed on his farm, he said. He remembers looking for bodies after the plane fell, and that some of the bodies that fell from the plane landed directly in his fields, creating dead spots in the next summer’s hay yield.
He also remembers walking through his fields and stumbling upon the plane’s tail and knowing immediately that the crash wasn’t an accident when he smelled the dynamite used to blow up the plane mid-flight.
Hopp, who has lived in the area his whole life, remembers his younger brother making it out of the house and into the fields despite being told to stay inside. The young boy stumbled upon a body and screamed out, Hopp said.
Those are only some of the reasons why Hopp’s family resolved not to talk about what happened.
Hopp said knowing a memorial event to honor Flight 629’s victims and the first responders is planned for Saturday in Denver has helped him feel better since the explosion, after years of feeling the pain of living with witnessing such death and destruction.
“It means a lot,” Hopp said. “Showing respect for the survivors at this time is important.”
The Denver Police Museum will dedicate the memorial to the 44 victims and the first responders at the Old Stapleton Airport Tower, where Flight 629 originated, according to a press release.
Other memorial events on Saturday include the Denver City and County Building being lit in blue on the nights of Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 to commemorate the flight and a 7 p.m. symposium at the University of Denver to discuss what happened to the plane and how it changed the American judicial system.
The public is welcome to attend the memorial dedication at 11 a.m. Saturday at the Old Stapleton Airport Tower on Uinta Street in Denver.
Jenna Ellis, a Colorado native and former lawyer for then-President Donald Trump in 2020, will not be allowed to practice law in Colorado for at least three years under an agreement approved Tuesday by the Colorado Supreme Court.
Ellis, who is from Longmont, had faced the possibility of total disbarment after pleading guilty in October to a felony in Georgia related to efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss there. Daysha Young, a prosecutor in that case, told the court there that Ellis had “aided and abetted” two of Trump’s attorneys as they falsely told Georgia state senators that tens of thousands of illegal votes were cast in the state.
Colorado’s governing body for attorneys previously had censured Ellis after she admitted making repeated false statements about the 2020 presidential election.
In the agreement, lawyers for Ellis and the state of Colorado acknowledged that “while disbarment is the presumptive sanction for (Ellis’) misconduct, it is significant that her criminal culpability was due to her conduct as an accessory, not as a principal.” That, combined with her letter of remorse, may have saved her from total disbarment.
In her letter, Ellis wrote that she “turned a blind eye” to the possibility that senior lawyers for the Trump campaign could be sharing false information as part of a “cynical ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign.”
“In (accepting the suspension), I will hopefully encourage others who may still believe that the election was ‘stolen’ to consider changing their position,” Ellis wrote. “Everything that has come out since has not proven that claim.”
John Michael Richilano, Ellis’ lawyer, told The Denver Post that “unlike others in the Trump orbit, she stepped forward and took responsibility and told the truth.”
“She did this at considerable personal cost,” he added, “having received threatening emails, texts and tweets, also of the obscene variety. … She gratefully accepted suspension of her license understanding her role and realizing, after the fact, that there was a lot of untruths being advanced on behalf of the former president.”
All northbound and southbound lanes are closed at 1st Avenue and Emery Street at mile point 315.4 in Longmont.
The Burlington Northern Santa Fe train is blocking multiple intersections, including 1st Avenue and Main Street, 1st Avenue and Coffman Street and 1st Avenue and Emery Street.
The derailment, caused by a detached wheel on a train car, is minor, but the train cannot be moved until it is repaired, according to the City of Longmont. The repair will likely occur after 8 a.m. on Friday.
Travelers should expect delays and detours in the area. The City of Longmont recommends finding an alternate route.
