In July 1970 a man on horseback carried the mail from Monument Lake Resort to the post office every morning at half past nine, six days a week. His name was Bud Wiegers, and the local paper noted almost in passing that he was also the mayor of Monument, the town’s fire chief and its town marshal. Fifty-six years later the town he served part-time is planning around thirty-seven sworn police officers. This is how it got from one to the other.
Monument Police Department, at a Glance
The Town Bought a Jail Before It Bought Streetlights
Monument held its first town meeting on July 3, 1879, in Gwillim Hall at the corner of Third and Front streets. The men chosen that day were Henry Limbach as mayor, A.F. Woodward as recorder and W.E. Holbrook as the first town marshal, according to the Monument chronology kept by the Palmer Lake Historical Society.
One officer. That was the whole of it, and it would remain close to the whole of it for a very long time.
It is also the date the department claims. The badge a Monument police officer wears today is an oval bearing the state seal against the Front Range, ribboned with the words “Monument Police,” and along its shoulders, in two halves, the legend EST. 1879. Whatever the department’s institutional paperwork says — and the ordinances that would settle it have not been examined for this article — the department itself traces its line back past every chief, past the building on Beacon Lite Road, past the trailers and the calaboose, to a July meeting in a hall on Third Street and a man named Holbrook.
What the town did next says something about its priorities. Lucille Lavelett’s Through the Years at Monument, Colorado, drawing on the town’s own minutes, records that officials appointed a committee to plan a calaboose in September 1880 and estimated the cost at $150 the following month. R.C. Elliott, Henry Limbach and Chas. Tiner were named to build it on Lot 8, Block 8, with a ceiling of $125. Construction began in March 1881, when the committee was permitted to spend past the cap as necessary to finish. The bills Lavelett lists come to $136.60 — $35 for labor, $16.50 for window iron, $32 for nails, $40 for shingles and siding, plus foundation ties, a stove, banking around the building and blankets. Over the cap by $11.60, and under the original estimate by $13.40.
Set that against the same historical society’s chronology of the town’s other improvements. Water pipes were laid along the streets and alleys in 1888. Oil streetlights were purchased in 1892. Telephone service arrived in 1896. Monument built somewhere to hold a lawbreaker seven years before it had running water, eleven years before it could light a street and fifteen years before anyone in town could make a telephone call.
The building itself was one room with a dirt floor. Six years on, the town laid a wooden floor and voted to partition the space; in 1887 the mayor and the town magistrate were authorized to obtain as many balls and chains as they thought necessary. Lavelett’s account of who actually slept there is the more human detail: mostly it held people who had drunk too much and travelers with no money for a bed. Residents began calling it the jail in 1895. It was moved twice, ending on Washington Street in 1920, and was torn down in 1943.
It was not the only place the town locked people up. At 243 Washington Street stands the general store William “Penny” Lierd began building in 1881, the year the calaboose went up — a store that sold dry goods, shoes, groceries and, because funeral parlors were then unheard of, a full line of caskets and coffins. Lierd earned his nickname from a customer who settled a $50 coffin debt entirely in pennies and made him count them.
Generations later, restoring part of the property, “Woody” Woodworth found something in the cellar. “We found the bars,” he told Rob Carrigan. “It looked like there was possibly three partitions to divide cells.” Early on, Woodworth said, the cellar had served as a jail.
The building has since held a farmers’ co-op, a feed and fuel business, a garden center, a winery and an artist’s studio. In 1966 it was bought by the Monument Volunteer Fire Department, which renovated it with Carl Campbell — a former fire chief — as engineer of the work, and which kept the town’s fire trucks there. Children of the era remember playing bingo in the fire hall.
One building on Washington Street, then: coffins in the front, cells in the cellar, fire engines in the bay. It is difficult to think of a more economical summary of what a small town needs.
The Marshal Who Became a Memorial
W.E. Holbrook was more than a name at the top of a list.
When he died in the spring of 1894, the Monument Messenger printed a death notice that the Castle Rock Journal reprinted, and it is preserved in the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. He died of thrombosis at his residence in Monument. He was born in Potsdam, in St. Lawrence County, New York. He was a veteran of the Civil War, a member of the Grand Army of the Republic and a past commander of its post here. He had settled in Monument about eighteen years earlier, and he had served several years as the town’s mayor.
The notice ends the way small-town papers used to end them, and the phrasing is worth keeping: he was “a leading, and one of our most respected citizens,” and “all who knew him loved him well.”
Four years later the town made the compliment permanent. In February 1898 the Rocky Mountain News reported from Monument that Harlan Thomas, division commander of the Colorado Sons of Veterans, had come to organize a camp. Twenty-two members joined, S.W. Bell was elected captain, and the camp was named the W.E. Holbrook Camp in honor of the old soldier who had commanded Monument’s C.F. Coleman post. About fifty people in the community were eligible to join. A delegation came up from Colorado Springs to help.
Within a generation of incorporation, Monument’s first lawman had become part of the town’s civic memory.
One Man, Three Offices
For most of the century that followed, Monument was too small to need a police department and too spread out to go without a lawman, and it solved the problem the way small towns do: it asked one person to do several jobs at once.
In April 1968 a Monument resident named Leon E. “Pop” Whitney wrote to the Palmer Lake-Monument News to say how much he liked the paper, and got sidetracked into praising his neighbors. One of them was the town marshal. “One other who has gotten under my fifth rib, is our town Marshal, Don Brown,” Whitney wrote, and then explained why. Whitney was recovering from a heart attack and moving house. Among his belongings was a rubber tree that had been brought to him in the hospital by the people he had worked with, and which had grown to seven feet in the three years since. Brown remembered that he wanted it. He and his brother-in-law put it in the back of a pickup, one steadying it while the other drove, and carried it inside “with as much of tender care as if they’d been handling a sick old man.” The letter runs in the issue of May 2, 1968.
Two years later the same paper published the plainest description of small-town municipal capacity anyone has yet found. Under the headline “Pony Express U.S. Mail,” it described Bud Wiegers and his horse Toni relaying the mail from Monument Lake Resort to the Monument Post Office each morning at 9:30, six days a week. Then, in a single sentence: “Bud is also the Mayor of Monument — he is the Fire Chief of Monument, and the Town Marshal so he has a full schedule.” The item ran on July 23, 1970.
A full schedule indeed. It is also the reason the county appears so often in Monument’s crime reports of the period.
Stoney
Through the middle 1960s the officer who turns up in the local paper investigating Monument’s break-ins is not a Monument officer at all. He is an El Paso County deputy sheriff whom everyone, including the newspaper, simply called Stoney.
In March 1966 vandals tore the pay telephone out of the wall of the Monument Post Office lobby and carried it off, causing what the paper called extensive damage. Stoney had leads. Two weeks later he was back: the telephone had been pulled apart and dumped on private property at Panorama Acres, and he had also been called to Monument Lake Resort, where someone had tried and failed to tear a second telephone off a wall. That December someone broke the front-door glass of the Monument Cafe, removed the lock and broke into the cigarette machine; the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Chester Porter, were both in the hospital at the time. Stoney investigated. In April 1967 he was looking into two saddles and a blanket taken from a tack room at the ranch of W.W. Carrothers — the same Carrothers who, with his wife, had twice privately financed the town’s fire station.
Stoney was Deputy Bob Stone, and he had a reason to know Monument’s roads. A January 1979 profile in the Black Forest News described him as a sixteen-year Black Forest resident with more years of service than any deputy in the county’s history, and reported that the newly elected sheriff, Red Davis, was restoring the Black Forest outpost that had been closed in 1976. Davis put the case for it simply: he believed in stationing officers where they lived. The paper explained why residents cared — in country like this it matters that the officer knows the roads and the lanes and who lives down them.
For a decade or more, that outpost put a county deputy in the north of El Paso County who knew Monument by name. It is a good arrangement, and a version of it has never really stopped.
Badge Number 1
The town’s own force grew up in the second half of the 1970s, and the clearest account of how it happened comes from the man who wore its first badge.
Kevin Swenson was hired on January 18, 1978, and served until December 13, 2011 — nearly thirty-four years, the longest career in the department’s documented history. His badge number was 1. In 2017, when the town named a lane near Monument Lake for him, he told Rob Carrigan, then the editor and publisher of the Tri-Lakes Tribune, how the department had come to exist: Monument’s separate police department was created out of the breakup of a single force that had policed Monument, Palmer Lake and Woodmoor under the El Paso County Sheriff. Al Karn was the new department’s first employee, arriving about a year before Swenson. Rick Tudor, Swenson said, carried badge number 2.
That account fits everything else in the record. It explains why a county deputy was investigating Monument’s burglaries in 1966 and 1967. It explains why, on February 3, 1977, The Douglas County News could report an arrest in Palmer Lake investigated by Palmer Lake Town Marshal Dale Smith, Deputy Ray Foster and “Monument-Woodmoor Police Chief Al Karn” — a chief with a hyphenated territory, in the very year the separation was under way. And it sits alongside the fact, from our own reporting on Woodmoor, that Woodmoor ran a police department of its own from 1972 to 1994. Three communities, one sheriff’s arrangement, and then three answers.
The Monument that Swenson joined is worth pausing on. “I knew all 365 people in town of Monument at the time,” he told Carrigan. He delivered welcome packages to newcomers — a new phone book, a map, some other things — and described himself as a “Citizen’s Officer.” If somebody had drunk too much at the bowling alley, an officer would drive them home rather than wait to catch them driving.
The department was also short-handed, which produced the single best artifact of Monument policing anyone has recorded. To make the town look better patrolled than it was, officers would park a car on Front Street with a mannequin in the driver’s seat. They called him Officer George.
“It was alright for a short period,” Swenson said. “But we got a lot of calls about ‘Officer George’s’ welfare if we didn’t move him pretty often.”
The people of Monument kept ringing the police to check whether the fake policeman was all right.
Swenson’s list of the department’s firsts is a small history of law enforcement technology arriving in a town of a few hundred people: he wrote the grant that bought its first computer, a Kaypro; he brought in its first Intoxilyzer and its first radar gun; and he was among its first bicycle officers. He served under six chiefs.
He is also the source for where the department actually worked before it had a building. “When we first started, we were working out of the trunk of the patrol car,” he said. After that came part of a laundromat, then small trailers, then various other office setups, and finally the town hall.
The Karn Years
Karn stayed. In December 1979 the Rocky Mountain News ran a photograph of him examining a tampered safe at Lewis-Palmer High School after vandals rifled the vending machines and forced two safes; the caption named him “Monument Chief of Police Allen Karn.” In October 1983, when a DC-3 registered to a company with a Monument post-office box was shot down over Nicaragua, the reporter who needed a local voice found one: “said Monument Police Officer Kevin Swenson.”
By January 1990 the department had four people in it, and its chief was a fourteen-year veteran. We know this because of a small dispute that the town resolved and that, read at this distance, describes the department better than any annual report could. Some in town government felt it was not quite right for the chief to turn up at a call with dirty hands. Karn’s explanation, carried on the Associated Press wire, was that he did most of the work on the patrol cars himself, and that when a call came he thought he ought to go to the emergency first and wash afterward. The town board settled its differences with him without a hearing, and an officer dismissed the previous November was reinstated after a review found no grounds for it.
A chief of police who serviced his own fleet. In a four-officer department in a town of a few thousand people, that is not an eccentricity. It is arithmetic.
Three months later the Colorado Department of Public Safety published its first Crime Victim Services Directory, and Monument’s entry reads: Chief Alan Karn, Monument Police Dept., P.O. Box 325, Monument, CO 80132, (719) 481-3253. Under additional information, five words: “Work in conjunction with El Paso County.”
The neighbors in that same directory are instructive. Palmer Lake’s department was headed by a marshal, Dale Smith — the same man who had made the Glenside arrest thirteen years earlier. Green Mountain Falls still ran a Marshal’s Office. Monument had moved to a chief; the towns on either side had not. And the phone number printed beside Karn’s name in 1990 is the number the Monument Police Department answers today.
Eight Officers and a Telephone That Followed You Home
By the end of the 1990s the department was still small enough to describe in a paragraph. The FBI’s 1998 count of law-enforcement employees gives Monument eight full-time employees, all of them sworn officers and none of them civilians.
The best surviving description of what those officers did comes from the chief himself. In January 2002, Joe Kissell wrote a column for Our Community News answering the questions the department was most often asked, and it is a small masterpiece of practical government writing. The office was at 154 North Washington Street. Between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. there was usually somebody in it. After five, the non-emergency line rang three times and then forwarded to whichever officer was in the field, on his or her cell phone. The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office dispatched the calls. In an emergency, dial 911.
Kissell listed his own strength precisely: eight full-time officers, one sergeant, one part-time officer, the chief, and three part-time civilian support staff. The town then had about 2,500 residents, split between Old Town and a fast-growing Jackson Creek. Crime was mostly misdemeanors — minor theft, trespass, criminal mischief — with a run of construction theft where the new houses were going up. The department would take your fingerprints for $5 if you lived in Monument and $20 if you did not. It would check your vehicle identification number. It would not unlock your car, because slim jims damage doors, but it would help you find a locksmith. The column runs on page 14.
He also had to explain, patiently, that Woodmoor and Baptist Road were the sheriff’s jurisdiction even though the people who lived there had Monument mailing addresses. That confusion is older than the department and has outlived every chief who has tried to clear it up.
Two years later the town did something about the seams. On March 15, 2004, Monument and Palmer Lake signed an intergovernmental agreement letting each town’s officers exercise full police powers in the other when asked, with requests passed through the sheriff’s dispatcher. The model, Our Community News noted, was the arrangement the North Group fire districts already used. The fire service wrote the template; the police adopted it.
The Audit That Pointed Forward
The department’s modern professional turn can be dated fairly precisely to the summer of 2001.
The Town Board had dismissed Chief Al Sharon that April. Between then and the arrival of his successor, the town paid about $15,000 for an outside assessment of the entire department, carried out by Integrated Network Incorporated of Colorado Springs and AJ Resources of Wheat Ridge. The consultants interviewed every member of the department and examined fourteen categories of operation. They presented at a special meeting on July 13, and Our Community News covered it in full.
What they found was a mixture, and the good part came first: the department had, in their words, “some highly skilled and highly dedicated employees.” What it did not have was the machinery around them. There were two policy and procedure manuals in circulation — one complete but out of date, the other containing three revised sections — so officers could not always tell which rules applied. The town’s press release acknowledged deficiencies in recordkeeping and in hiring practices. And the department had been declining to enforce traffic law on the stretch of Highway 105 that runs through town, on the view that it lay outside Monument’s jurisdiction; the assessment concluded that Colorado statute did not prevent the town from enforcing state law on adjacent roadways. Mayor Leon Tenney put the principle plainly: the town’s first obligation is to see that laws are enforced, whoever’s line the road happens to be on.
The conclusion is the part worth remembering. The assessment did not describe a department in trouble. It said the department was in “an excellent position to prepare for growth.” The mayor and trustees voted unanimously to have the town manager and the incoming chief implement every recommendation.
Three days later, on July 16, the trustees swore in Joe Kissell, a twenty-five-year veteran of the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office and a graduate of the FBI Academy, chosen from three finalists.
This is the real beginning of the modern department: not a badge or a patrol car, but manuals, records, hiring files and a clear answer to who polices Highway 105.
Trailers, Barcodes and a Building Paid For With Water
Professionalizing a department is one thing. Housing it is another.
By 2004 the police station had become the town’s standing embarrassment. Trustee George Case, who had served six years on the Police Advisory Committee, told incoming members that the building was the worst in the state. A ballot question to fund a new one had missed a filing deadline for the 2003 election, and under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights the next opportunity would not come until November 2005. In the meantime the committee heard something that deserves more attention than it got: combining police and town administrative functions in a single building would lower construction costs, but it would also disqualify the building from most of the grants police departments normally chase. The town went ahead knowing the trade.
What the department did in the meantime is the most Monument detail in this entire history. In May 2005 Chief Jake Shirk reported to the board that the department had bought a handheld barcode scanner and a barcode printer for the evidence room, and that evidence would be inventoried and moved into the second single-wide trailer once the permits came through. The report is in the June 2005 issue. Modern chain-of-custody controls, in a trailer, pending permits.
Shirk himself had arrived that spring. Town Manager Rick Sonnenburg announced on February 11, 2005 that the new chief would be Jacob Shirk, a captain with twenty-nine years at the Aurora Police Department. Reached by telephone at his office in Aurora, Shirk said his first order of business would be “to do nothing, just observe how the department operates for the first 30 days,” and described himself as a practitioner of community-oriented policing: “Success can only come with the cooperation and assistance of residents and business owners.” The panel that recommended him included two trustees, a Police Advisory Committee member, the outgoing chief and the department’s acting chief, Sgt. Rick Tudor. The announcement is in the March 2005 issue.
The building came together slowly and was paid for in an unusual way. In November 2005 Monument’s voters allowed the town to spend revenue from its one-cent water sales tax above the TABOR limit on a police station and government facility, and the board separately capped that use at $2.5 million. Ground was broken on June 18, 2008 at the southwest corner of Beacon Lite Road and Highway 105.
By that November the full cost of the project — the 1.13-acre lot at $564,683, design and permitting at $240,066, a $2.9 million ten-year lease-purchase from Wells Fargo for the construction contract, $755,981 in interest and finance charges, and $20,000 for security, alarms and telephones — came to $4.481 million. Town Manager Cathy Green, who had joined the town as its planner in the same week Shirk became chief, made a point of reminding trustees that neither the 2005 ballot question nor the 2005 ordinance had ever capped what the building itself could cost; the cap governed only how much water money could go into it. An emergency ordinance to lift the cap to $3.7 million was tabled on November 17. On December 1 the board passed a regular ordinance raising it to $4.4 million and stretching the contribution over eight years, from 2009 to 2016, with the share of water-tax revenue going to the building cut from 60 percent to 32 percent so that more could be set aside for water rights. The vote was 5-1. Trustee Gail Drumm, the dissenter, wanted other lines in the town budget examined before more water money was diverted. The debate and the figures are reported in the December 2008 issue.
Staff moved in on May 7 and 8, 2009. The ribbon was cut on June 27, with Chief Shirk standing alongside County Commissioner Wayne Williams, Trustee Tim Miller, Mayor Pro Tem Rafael Dominguez and two former mayors, Leon Tenney and Si Sibell. Our Community News photographed it.
The town had put its police department in a permanent building by taxing water and agreeing to wait eight years to finish paying for it.
Volunteers, a Lieutenant and a Fire
The department that moved into Beacon Lite Road spent the next decade adding the things a real police department has.
In January 2009 it swore in its first volunteer reserve officer, Gregory Fell, at a Monument Board of Trustees meeting. His wife Carol pinned on his badge while Chief Shirk, Mayor Byron Glenn and Trustee Tommie Plank looked on. The photograph ran in the February 2009 issue.
In June 2010 the board approved a lieutenant’s position to serve as second in command, acting as chief in the chief’s absence. It was created by upgrading one of the department’s three sergeant slots, so the number of officers on the street did not change. Shirk was candid with the board about the economics: the sergeant promoted into the job would actually earn less, because the $5,000 increase in base salary would not cover the overtime he would give up. The June 7 meeting is reported in the July 2010 issue.
And in June 2013 the whole department went to the Black Forest fire, the most destructive in Colorado’s history. For nine days Monument officers worked evacuations, road closures and roving patrols in the burn area while covering their own town, and on September 3 Chief Shirk gave a Chief’s Commendation to every one of them: Officers Andrew Romano, Greg Fell, Joe Lundy, Jonathan Hudson, Michael Case, Ryan Schott, Samantha Griebel and Robert Steine; Sergeants Mark Owens and Rick Tudor; Corporal Rob Stewart; Detective Steve Lontz; and Lt. Steve Burk. “I am so proud of each and every one of you,” Shirk told them, “on how you responded and how you reacted in dealing with that fire and the danger that you were placed in.”
The same evening the department said goodbye to badge number 2. Sgt. Rick Tudor retired after twenty-seven years. It was Tudor who had interviewed Shirk for the chief’s job eight years earlier and asked him how he would handle a homicide investigation; Shirk thought he had answered badly, and only later learned he had given the right answer. Officer Fell retired the same night, closing a fifteen-year career in volunteer law enforcement, the last four and a half of it in Monument. The meeting is reported in the October 2013 issue.
The Town Votes for Its Police
Then Monument grew, and the department had to catch up.
The scale of it is easiest to see in the town’s own numbers. The development impact-fee study the town commissioned in 2026 counts 6,104 residents in 2010 and 12,696 in 2024 — a doubling in fourteen years, at more than three times the growth rate of El Paso County as a whole.
The department grew too, but on a different curve. The FBI counted fourteen employees in 2014, eleven of them sworn, and twenty-two in 2019, eighteen sworn.
Chief Shirk’s last annual presentation to the board, in early 2019, is a good picture of the department at that moment: eighteen officers, four support staff, a chaplain and three vacancies. He listed what the department ran on top of patrol — officer-initiated traffic safety, Neighborhood Watch, gun locks given out to residents, safety training for citizens, a school resource officer. He described a web of mutual reliance: the sheriff had commissioned every Monument officer as a deputy so they could help the county, and in return the larger agencies supplied SWAT and police dogs when Monument needed them. The department was training fire paramedics to enter “warm zones” alongside officers so that casualties could be reached sooner. And Shirk explained why a town of this size now needed a full-time detective, in a sentence that has aged well: “this is not Mayberry anymore.” The presentation is reported in the March 2019 issue.
Shirk’s fourteen years ended in 2019. Mark Owens, one of the sergeants commended after the Black Forest fire, served as chief in the interval. On January 15, 2020 the town announced that Cristian “Sean” Hemingway would take over on February 3. He was chosen from three finalists — the others were a Colorado Springs lieutenant and a serving Monument officer — and brought thirty years in Florida law enforcement, twenty-two as a police major in Pembroke Pines and six as chief in Bay Harbor Islands.
The thing Monument then did about all this is the most important event in the department’s modern history, and it took the town two attempts.
In November 2020 voters were asked to add a half-cent sales tax dedicated to police services, programs and facilities. They said no, 3,568 to 2,643.
In November 2021 the town came back with a narrower and more specific question. Ballot Issue 2F asked for the same half cent, but named what it would buy: additional officers and equipment replacement, an estimated $1.65 million in its first year. It passed, 2,061 to 1,252. Both results are on the town’s election page.
The effect was immediate and visible. At the first council meeting of 2022, on January 3, two officers were sworn in as commanders — Tim Johnson, who had joined the department in 2019 after twenty years in the Navy and twelve as a Fountain patrol officer, sergeant, SWAT team leader and ATF task force officer, and John Lupton, who had come to Monument the previous year after more than two decades with the Colorado State Patrol. One of the two commander posts existed because 2F had passed. The meeting is reported in the February 2022 issue.
For the first time in its history, the department had a revenue stream of its own rather than a claim on the same pot as roads and water.
Thirty Officers, and a Plan for Thirty-Seven
Hemingway retired at the start of 2023. Commander Tim Johnson served as interim chief from early January while the town worked through roughly seventy-five applicants, and on May 8 Patrick Regan took office. Regan had retired as a commander with the Scottsdale Police Department in Arizona, bringing twenty-three years in law enforcement and eleven in progressive supervision, a bachelor’s degree from Northern Arizona University and a master’s in public administration from Arizona State, and graduation from both the FBI National Academy and the FBI-LEEDA command institute. The town announced the appointment that spring.
By November 2024 the department had twenty-nine officers, with one more position funded in the budget, and was swearing in new ones at council meetings the way it had sworn in Gregory Fell fifteen years earlier: Joshua Teeples and Anthony Sealey took the oath on November 18, their wives pinning on the badges, and Officer Christopher Sullivan was promoted to sergeant while his son struggled with the pin. Our Community News was there.
In February 2026 the town’s development impact-fee study put a number on where this is heading. Prepared by Economic & Planning Systems, it uses thirty sworn officers as the department’s current level of service and anticipates thirty-seven within about a decade. It values the department’s capital assets — half of the Town Hall building, 8,376 square feet at $500 a square foot, plus vehicles, duty gear, uniforms and onboarding costs — at $6,432,306, and offsets that by the $1.65 million the public-safety sales tax brings in.
The study’s other finding is the one that puts the department’s position in the town in perspective. The consultants examined impact fees for parks, transportation, facilities, fleet and police, and concluded that only police met the legal tests. Of all the things Monument’s growth is doing to Monument, policing is the one the town can most defensibly ask new development to help pay for.
What Has Not Changed
Look at the department today and the through-line is easy to find.
The Monument Police Department works from 645 Beacon Lite Road, the building the town paid for with water money. Its patrol officers are on the street twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, all of them certified through Colorado’s Peace Officer Standards and Training board. A commander oversees the detective who handles narcotics and major crimes and runs the crime scenes. A community resource officer works part-time with the schools and businesses and supports Neighborhood Watch groups, which the department asks to meet at least twice a year. Officers still take fingerprints and run background checks at the counter.
The building also brought the town something it had not had since 1943. When Rob Carrigan was shown around in January 2017, the lower level held two holding cells — about nine feet by nine, three walls of cinder block and a fourth of heavy mesh, a bench, a drain in the floor. Nobody could stay longer than six hours, and a sworn officer had to be present the whole time. Commander Steve Burk, who had been Monument’s first lieutenant, told him that officers from Monument, the sheriff’s office, Palmer Lake and the Colorado State Patrol all used them, that it was one of the few such facilities in northern El Paso County, and that the town had only had it since the building opened. Sometimes both cells were full with a line waiting. Sometimes nobody went near them for weeks.
Burk also gave Carrigan the detail that makes the whole history rhyme. For all the cameras and databases and certifications, he said, “it is still the large key turning the lock, to secure the door.”
A big steel key on a four-inch ring, hanging on the wall. The town voted itself one of those in 1880, and paid $136.60 for the room to go with it.
They still do not do it alone. When a Monument officer uses deadly force, the investigation goes to a Critical Response Team drawn from across the Fourth Judicial District, under the district attorney’s direction, with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office and the Colorado Springs Police Department in the room. The non-emergency number the department publishes for reporting a crime is the sheriff’s dispatch line, staffed around the clock — the same arrangement Joe Kissell described in 2002 and the same partnership the 1990 directory recorded in five words. In 2025 the Monument Fire District trained twenty-four Monument police officers in CPR, which is roughly the whole patrol strength of the department.
And the number the department answers, 719-481-3253, is the number printed beside Alan Karn’s name in a state directory in April 1990, when there were four officers and the chief changed the oil.
The badge says 1879. On the evidence, that is the right answer — not because the institution has run unbroken since, but because the job has. Somebody in Monument has been answerable for this since the summer the town first met.
In March 2017 the town named a lane running west off Mitchell Avenue toward Monument Lake — a road that had been there a hundred and twenty-five years or more — Swenson Lane. Dozens of people came out in the wind to shake his hand. Rick Tudor, badge number 2, drove seven hours from Thermopolis, Wyoming, to be there. Chief Jake Shirk came. A few hours later many of the same people walked a hundred yards to Si Sibell’s barn to remember Al Karn, the department’s first employee, who had died earlier that month. Swenson died that September.
Before he was a police officer, Swenson had been an Air Force mechanic, and then a lifeguard at Monument Lake, where he first trained in first aid and CPR and started driving an ambulance. The lane named for badge number 1 runs down to the water where he learned it.
The town has grown roughly eighteenfold since it counted 690 people in 1980. The department has grown from one marshal with two other jobs to thirty sworn officers with a plan for thirty-seven. What connects the two ends is not an unbroken institution — it is a small town repeatedly deciding how much law enforcement it could sustain, what it would share with its neighbors, and, in November 2021, agreeing to tax itself to find out.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: Woodmoor, Explained: The Biggest Tri-Lakes Community That Isn’t a Town — for the Woodmoor Police Department, 1972 to 1994 · A History of the Monument Fire Department — the companion history, and the source for the 2025 CPR training figure · What Monument’s License-Plate Cameras Capture, Keep and Share — how the department uses automated plate readers today · Not an HOA: The Government That Runs Much of Monument — the jurisdictional patchwork every chief has had to explain
Local history: Palmer Lake Historical Society, Monument history and chronology · Lucille Lavelett, Through the Years at Monument, Colorado, fifth edition, “The Calaboose,” p. 86
Newspaper record, via the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection: Castle Rock Journal, Apr. 4, 1894 (Holbrook death notice, reprinted from the Monument Messenger) · Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 6, 1898 · Palmer Lake-Monument News, Mar. 24, 1966 · Apr. 7, 1966 · Dec. 15, 1966 · Apr. 6, 1967 · May 2, 1968 · July 23, 1970 · The Douglas County News, Feb. 3, 1977 · Black Forest News, Jan. 25, 1979 · Rocky Mountain News, Dec. 21, 1979 · Oct. 8, 1983 · The Steamboat Today, Jan. 25, 1990 (Associated Press) · The Louisville Times, Mar. 19, 1994
Government record: Colorado Department of Public Safety, Colorado Crime Victim Services Directory, April 1990 · FBI Uniform Crime Reports, full-time law-enforcement employees: 1998, 2014, 2019 · Town of Monument election results · Town of Monument Development Impact Fee Feasibility Study, Economic & Planning Systems, Feb. 9, 2026 · 1980 Census of Population, Colorado, Table 4 · Census Bureau population estimates for Colorado places, 2000–2003
Rob Carrigan’s reporting: Carrigan, a third-generation Coloradan, was editor and publisher of the Tri-Lakes Tribune and of the Pikes Peak Courier View, Teller County Extra and Cripple Creek Gold Rush. He preserves his Monument reporting on his blog, Restless Native: “Badge Number 1 for Monument Police Department” (March 2017), the interview with Kevin Swenson at the naming of Swenson Lane · “Holding Pattern: Not in the jailhouse now, but headed there” (January 2017), on the department’s holding cells, with Commander Steve Burk · “Years of friendly, local service in one spot” (January 2016), on 243 Washington Street, its cellar cells and its long succession of tenants. Photographs by Rob Carrigan.
Contemporary reporting: Our Community News, July 2001 (the assessment; Kissell sworn in) · January 2002 (Chief Kissell’s column) · April 2004 (Police Advisory Committee; the Palmer Lake mutual-aid agreement) · March 2005 (Shirk named) · June 2005 (evidence barcoding) · July 2008 (groundbreaking) · December 2008 (the funding cap) · February 2009 (first reserve officer) · May 2009 (move-in) · July 2009 (ribbon-cutting) · July 2010 (lieutenant created) · October 2013 (Black Forest commendations; Tudor retires) · March 2019 (Shirk’s annual presentation) · February 2022 (commanders sworn in) · December 2024 (twenty-nine officers) · KKTV, Jan. 14, 2020 · KOAA, spring 2023
The department today: Monument Police Department · Patrol Division · Investigations · Special Units · Neighborhood Watch · Town of Monument
Methodology
Every newspaper article cited here was opened and read in full in the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection rather than taken from a search result or a summary. Optical character recognition in these scans is imperfect; quotations have been corrected silently for evident scanning errors and never for wording. Two items need a note of their own. The Associated Press report of January 1990 survives in a scan that is clipped mid-sentence in several places; the department’s size, the two officers’ lengths of service and the substance of the dispute are legible, but the chief’s explanation of the “dirty hands” complaint is paraphrased above rather than quoted, because the sentence cannot be read in full. And the 1898 notice of the Sons of Veterans camp is the only source that names Monument’s Grand Army post; the 1894 death notice refers to it only as “this post.”
The account of the calaboose — the 1880 committee and its $150 estimate, the $125 ceiling, the builders, the Lot 8, Block 8 site, the March 1881 start, the itemized bills totaling $136.60, the dirt floor, the 1887 partition and the balls and chains, the building’s occupants, its two moves and its demolition in 1943 — comes from the chapter “The Calaboose” on page 86 of the fifth edition of Lucille Lavelett’s Through the Years at Monument, Colorado, which cites the town’s minutes. The underlying minute book has not been inspected. The book prints one of those dates as “Sept. 7, 1800,” which the surrounding entries make clear is a typographical error for 1880. The Palmer Lake Historical Society’s online chronology compresses all of this to “1880 – Jail (calaboose) was built”; Lavelett’s fuller account, drawn from the minutes, is followed here.
The account of the department’s formation — that Monument’s separate police department emerged from the breakup of a combined force covering Monument, Palmer Lake and Woodmoor under the El Paso County Sheriff, with Al Karn as its first employee and Kevin Swenson as its first officer — comes from Swenson himself, interviewed by Rob Carrigan in March 2017, thirty-nine years after the fact. It is a recollection rather than a record, and no founding ordinance has been examined for this article. It is used here because every independent document supports it: a county deputy working Monument’s cases in 1966 and 1967, a chief with a Monument-Woodmoor title in February 1977, and a chief described in January 1990 as a fourteen-year veteran alongside an officer of twelve years, which places their starts in 1976 and 1978. Swenson’s dates of service, badge number and career length are as Carrigan reported them. One thing his account does not resolve is how a combined force covering Woodmoor squares with the Woodmoor Police Department that operated from 1972 to 1994; both are stated above without an attempt to reconcile them.
The description of the holding cells in the police building is set in the past tense and dated to January 2017 deliberately. It rests entirely on Rob Carrigan’s reporting and photographs from that month, including his interview with Commander Steve Burk. Nothing on the Town of Monument’s current website mentions holding cells, and the town’s February 2026 impact-fee study describes the department’s premises only as 8,376 square feet of police facilities without itemizing rooms. This newspaper has not confirmed that the cells remain in service, or that the arrangement Burk described — including use by Palmer Lake officers — still holds. Readers should treat it as a 2017 snapshot rather than a current account.
The cellar cells at 243 Washington Street rest on the present owner’s account of what his restoration work uncovered, reported by Carrigan in 2016. The bars and partitions are physical evidence; the date of their use is not established, and no attempt is made here to reconcile the cellar with the calaboose, which Lavelett describes as a separate wooden building on Lot 8, Block 8 that was moved to Washington Street only in 1920. That the same building later housed the volunteer fire department is drawn from the same account and is consistent with this newspaper’s history of the Monument Fire District.
Kevin Swenson’s thirty-four years are the longest documented career in the department. Rick Tudor is reported to have carried badge number 2, and separately to have retired in September 2013 after twenty-seven years, which would place his start about 1986. Badge numbers are commonly reassigned, so the two facts are not necessarily in conflict, and no start date is asserted for him here.
This article does not claim that Monument’s marshal’s office ran unbroken from 1879 to the 1970s, or that it can date the moment the title changed from marshal to chief. Neither can be established from the sources available. What the record does show is a town marshal in 1968 and 1970, a police chief by February 1977, and named Monument police officers from 1983 onward. The February 1977 report is also the only place in the entire Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection where the phrase “Monument-Woodmoor Police” appears, so it is presented above as what the newspaper called the agency rather than as the agency’s legal name. As late as March 1994 the Louisville Times described the same arrest as the work of both “Monument Police Officers” and “a marshal from Monument,” which is a useful reminder that outside newspapers used the two words loosely. The ordinances, minutes and payroll records that would answer these questions are held by the Town of Monument and have not been examined for this article.
Sgt. Rick Tudor’s start date of about 1986 is inferred from Our Community News‘s report of his retirement in September 2013 after twenty-seven years, not from a personnel record.
The “EST. 1879” reading comes from the Monument Police Department’s own officer badge, which is reproduced on this article’s card. It is evidence of the date the department uses for itself, not of a founding date established by ordinance.
The Palmer Lake-Monument News item of July 23, 1970 describes Bud Wiegers as Monument’s mayor, fire chief and town marshal simultaneously. The marshal and mayor descriptions are consistent with the rest of the record. The fire-chief description does not fit the succession of volunteer fire chiefs set out in this newspaper’s history of the Monument Fire District, which has Ray Bailey as chief through the middle 1960s and John McDonald Sr. as chief by 1971. The item is a caption in a community column rather than a news report, and the discrepancy is unresolved.
Population figures are from the 1980 Census of Population for 1980, from Census Bureau estimates for 2000, and from the town’s 2026 impact-fee study for 2010 and 2024. That study is not internally consistent about the town’s 2024 population, giving 12,696 in one table and two different figures elsewhere; the figure used here is the one in its table of population and household trends. Staffing figures distinguish between authorized positions, budgeted positions, total employees and sworn officers, which are four different things and are not interchangeable.
The Monument Police Department does not publish an annual report, so this article carries no year-by-year figures for calls for service, arrests or response times. The staffing series in the chart above is assembled from the sources named in it.
