Larimer County sheriff's victim advocates arrive in 41 minutes in 2025, a minute over goal

Larimer County's Sheriff's Office told commissioners at a Nov. 9 work session that its Victim Response Team advocates arrived in 41 minutes in 2025, a minute over the 40-minute goal, while the team assisted 2,862 victims, up from 2,100 in 2024.

The Victim Response Team assisted 2,862 victims in 2025, up from 2,100 in 2024, a Sheriff's Office staff member said. The goal is for an advocate to arrive within 40 minutes of being notified of a crisis, and the staff member said the team was right at 41 minutes in 2025 after hovering around 40 minutes in previous years. Volunteer advocates donated more than 5,000 hours, the staff member said.

The Sheriff's Office is beginning to launch the Danger Assessment for Law Enforcement, an 11-question risk-assessment tool for domestic violence calls intended to identify the highest risk of homicide or near-lethal assault, a staff member said. The District Attorney's Office said it worked with the Fort Collins Police Department on the tool and that the Sheriff's Office, Loveland and Estes Park were also joining its use. The District Attorney said the tool is a nationally developed set of questions meant to identify risk early and guide investigations and charging decisions, and called it "more robust than sort of the state-provided instrument".

The median time for the Sheriff's first Emergency Services Unit to reach a call was 29 minutes in 2025, compared with 31 minutes in 2024, data analyst Alex Bohl said. The goal is a median under 30 minutes. Bohl said the county covers 2,600 square miles and that medians keep remote calls from skewing the results. A staff member said the Patrol Division's median response time for its first unit on scene was 19.3 minutes in 2025, below its 20-minute goal.

A staff member said 99.7% of the 911 calls the Sheriff's Office answered were answered within 15 seconds. Another staff member said 99% of calls were answered within 10 seconds. For remote emergencies, a staff member said, 911 operators stay on the phone with callers until someone reaches the scene and seek help from available first responders, including those outside the office's jurisdiction.

The District Attorney said the office prosecutes just under 14,000 cases a year, up from the COVID-era decline but below the roughly 15,000 it prosecuted consistently in 2018 and 2019. Its time-to-resolution measure peaked at 170 days in 2021 and has since decreased, though the office did not give a current figure in the presentation.

The District Attorney said "the workload per case is drastically increased", citing body-worn cameras, cell-phone and computer downloads, and subpoenas to social-media and phone companies. The District Attorney said the judiciary cut criminal district courtrooms from six to five a few months ago and that the change could slow case resolution.

The District Attorney said the office prosecutes about 1,000 domestic violence cases a year, a level that has stayed roughly flat across the years shown in its data. The District Attorney cautioned that the count does not show the full level of domestic violence because the crime is underreported.

People in immigrant communities may fear that reporting domestic violence could lead to a household member's deportation, including someone the victim relies on financially, the District Attorney said. The District Attorney said the office has heard that people are "scared to report right now".

Jill Fox, director of Alternative Sentencing, said its Work Release, Electronic Home Detention and Workender programs had an 80% successful completion rate in 2025, matching the benchmark, with historical rates between 80% and 84%. Alexis Songley, director of Community Corrections, said it had a 73% completion rate in 2025, compared with about 62% across Colorado's community corrections programs.

A Community Justice Alternatives official said Pretrial Services' public safety rate was about 83% in 2025, short of its 85% target and down from 86% in 2024. The measure tracks whether supervised clients commit a new offense while their initial case is unresolved. The official put the daily cost of a jail bed in 2025 at $241.84, against $135.22 for Alternative Sentencing and $131.22 for Community Corrections.

The county manager said the lower costs of community alternatives reflect a different setting and services, not that those programs are better than an incarcerated setting. Keeping people out of incarceration, the county manager said, is "a real win for the county and for the community". A Community Justice Alternatives official said 448 people were in its programs on the day of the presentation and that without those placements they would be in jail or the Department of Corrections.

The coroner said the time between an autopsy and the signed final report was 56 days. The coroner said the National Association of Medical Examiners aims for 90% of autopsies to be completed within 90 days and has a goal of fewer than 60 days.

Coroner Stephen Hinks said the 249 Larimer County autopsy cases are part of a regional service, run alongside a partner in Weld County, that performs about 500 autopsies a year for communities in rural Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska and South Dakota. The coroner credited separating medical and administrative duties, along with investigators' access to medical records and work with families and providers, for shorter report times. "It's really made things more efficient and practical in our office," the coroner said.

The Department of Human Services reported that 90.5% of children who returned home from county care or custody were not removed again within 12 months in 2025, short of its 93% target. It reported that 79.9% of children remained safely at home under their case plans, the highest rate among the Big 11 across the state, against a target above 83%.

The department also reported a 35% reduction in the number of children entering its custody in 2025 from the prior year, while the acuity of cases had not decreased, a department official said.

Larimer County distributed one immunization for every 1.7 uninsured children in the last year, down from one for every two in 2022, Jared Olson, the department's senior population epidemiologist, said. Olson said there are about 3,000 uninsured children in the county. A Health and Environment staff member said the decline was due in part to the department's clinics in community settings, which aim to improve access.

Health and Environment officials said reaching uninsured families has become more difficult. An official said the department has worked "to just establish trusted relationships with as many of these communities and as many of these neighborhoods and families as possible".