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Dillon Keystone Police Department is official after joint swearing in ceremony, which also highlighted life-saving efforts

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Members of the Dillon Keystone Police Department take their oath together. The new department was sworn in at the joint Dillon and Keystone town council meeting May 27.
Kyle McCabe/Summit Daily News

The Dillon and Keystone town councils held a joint meeting May 27 in Keystone for the swearing in of the new Dillon Keystone Police Department. After the swearing in, Chief Cale Osborn handed out some commendations — including an American Red Cross Lifesaving Award.

Osborn said the creation of the new police department strikes him as bold. He thought it was bold when Keystone decided to become a town, and he thought the same when Dillon entertained the idea of sharing its police force with the new town.

“I think two towns making bold decisions — the end of that will increase the level of public safety on this side of the county,” Osborn said. “By the phone calls that I’m getting, clearly that has got people’s attention.”

Dillon Keystone Police Chief Cale Osborn speaks at the joint Dillon and Keystone town council meeting May 27 where he and the rest of the former Dillon Police Department were sworn into the new two-town force.
Kyle McCabe/Summit Daily News

Before having Keystone town clerk Maddy Sielu swear in the new police force, Osborn explained that he has seen departments swear in officers in different ways, like by rank, but that was not right for his team.

“Tonight, we’re going to get sworn in as a group because that’s how we operate,” Osborn said. “We’re all going to go at the same time.”

The department showed its new logo and badge on the screen, and Osborn said the logo represents both towns with three peaks set behind a sailboat on Lake Dillon. The badge represents the department, which he said does its best work outside.

“The badge, clearly from what it shows on paper, is not super shiny,” Osborn said. “Nor are we. We are not super shiny all of the time.”

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Keystone Mayor Ken Riley welcomed the police department staff to the “Keystone family” and said this is, to his knowledge, the second two-town police department in the state.

“We saw the success of the Winter Park Fraser Police Department,” Riley said. “But that said, in my wildest dreams, I never believed that within 15 months, 16 months, we’d have a joint police department.”

Osborn began the commendation part of the evening with the lifesaving awards, given to officers Dana DeGraaf and Daniel Ropers and former officer Chris Scherr, who now works for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

Before handing out the awards, Osborn directed attention to the screen to show a video American Red Cross produced about the incident that led to the Dillon Police and Summit Fire & EMS receiving lifesaving awards — their efforts that saved Ed Perry after a heart attack.

The video described the police and EMS response to the call — made by Ed’s wife, Anne — and how the survival rate of someone who is given CPR for over 30 minutes is 1%, but first responders saved Ed despite giving CPR for an hour and a half.

“We’re happy to be here,” Anne said at the meeting. “Especially me,” Ed added.

The couple thanked the police officers for their expertise, care and professionalism in responding to Ed’s heart attack. Anne joked that she was a hero as well for recognizing Ed’s agonal breathing, an irregular breathing that can be a sign of a heart attack, because her friend had told her about it a few weeks prior.

“If I didn’t hear that story, I would have — when he was snorting away — I would have said, ‘You’re annoying. I’m going to the other room,'” Anne said.

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The next commendation went to Det. Allen Jambor for his work on a multi-year operation that involved several jurisdictions around the state and brought car theft down by 30% in Colorado. Ropers received another commendation for his work developing the department’s field training program.

Osborn gave officer Anna Shanks a commendation for locating a high-profile suspect in Frisco and being willing to provide community service when she helped unlock a car in Copper Mountain.

“I’m told it’s the fastest car unlock anybody’s ever done,” Osborn said.

Sgts. Craig Johnson and Adam Nance and staff member Shawn Murdoch received commendations for their roles in creating the new Dillon Keystone Police Department, although Nance was not able to attend the meeting in person.

Osborn finished his comments by thanking the council members and staffs of both towns for their work to make the joint police department a reality.

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