The Auraria Campus police force will move into a new headquarters sometime next year and could more than double its staff by 2037.
Officials and state leaders gathered at the central Denver campus on Wednesday to officially start construction on the $36 million campus police building. The new building will have expanded police facilities, like office space and more holding cells, as well as classrooms, behavioral health response programs and student lounges.
“Some of our infrastructure just lacks at times,” Auraria Police Chief Jason Mollendor said at a groundbreaking ceremony this week. “So we need to make sure that our public safety mirrors best practices and what really is necessary for an urban campus in the middle of downtown Denver.”
The facility will be located at 7th Avenue and Curtis Street, on the south end of a campus that is home to the Community College of Denver, the University of Colorado Denver and Metropolitan State University of Denver.
State legislators provided funding for the project. Colorado Department of Higher Education Executive Director Angie Paccione said it was the only project at a higher education institution funded by this year’s state capital projects fund.
“As you know, there's some budget issues,” Paccione said. “And so thank goodness we were able to keep that funding and to make this happen.”
Campus officials aim to grow the police force.
The campus hopes to expand its police force significantly in the next 12 years. In 2024, Auraria Police employed 55 people, including 35 sworn officers who carry weapons and can make arrests.
The campus hopes to more than double the staff of both sworn and non-sworn employees. The campus could have as many as 72 armed police officers.
Mollendor said the number of police officers employed by the campus is small compared to other major universities in Colorado. He said policing a campus of over 42,000 students near downtown needs a larger force.
The University of Colorado Boulder, the state’s flagship university, has a police force of about 40 officers to oversee the 38,000-student campus. The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora has 29 police officers for close to 30,000 students, faculty, staff, plus thousands of patients.
Mollendor also points to the upcoming Ball Arena redevelopment as another reason the campus needs to invest in a bigger police force. The project aims to turn the vast sea of parking lots to the north of campus into a bustling expansion of downtown.
“It's going to really create that 24-hour environment where people are constantly coming through,” he said. “There's more people engaging on campus, going to the businesses on campus, hopefully taking classes on campus, which is definitely going to increase our workload as a police department.”
In 2024, about 800 police reports were filed by Auraria officers. The most common crimes included trespassing, theft, and driving under the influence.
Auraria’s new police center represents more spending on public safety by elected leaders in the metro area. City officials are set to approve siginificant races for the Denver Police Department.
The Auraria Campus police force faced criticism last year.
Campus police officers made headlines in 2024 for arresting 40 protesters who gathered at Auraria’s Tivoli Quad to protest Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, an event that Paccione alluded to in her remarks.
“I have to say that the spring of 2024 is when I realized how much this campus needed a new police center,” she told the crowd who came to the center’s groundbreaking ceremony.
Protesters, including both students and non-students, joined a nationwide movement in the spring of 2024 to set up overnight encampments to show solidarity with people in Gaza and to demand that their universities take action against the Israeli government. The Palestinian Ministry of Health says Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 60,000 people in Gaza; the war started in October 2023, when Hamas militants killed 1,200 people in Israel. Other campuses saw arrests, too.
On the second day of the protest, Auraria and Denver police officers arrested 40 protesters, citing a longstanding rule against overnight encampments on campus. Most, if not all, of the charges were later dropped by Denver prosecutors.
The arrests continue to affect the campus to this day. Several protesters arrested on that day have filed lawsuits against the campus police department, alleging illegal suppression of free speech. The latest one was filed just this week.
