COLORADO SPRINGS — A rise in smash-and-grab burglaries across Colorado Springs is stirring up frustration for local business owners and law enforcement, as juvenile suspects continue to find their way back out on the street after arrests.
Colorado Springs Police said there have been 40 smash-and-grab burglaries across the city this year, including a few in unincorporated El Paso County. Police said the vast majority of the crimes involve juvenile suspects, who often use a stolen car to ram into storefronts, grab merchandise, and drive off in another stolen vehicle.
Most of the burglaries are caught on store surveillance cameras and normally happen between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. Gun stores, pawn shops, and smoke shops are the likely targets, leaving business owners scrambling to clean up broken glass, damaged storefronts, and scattered merchandise when they get to their shops in the morning.
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Dutch Knudson, owner of Session Supply smoke shop, said he's closing down his location on South Academy Boulevard after it became a target in an overnight smash-and-grab in July. He said the group of suspects caused nearly $70,000 in damage when they smashed a car through the front of the store and ran off with merchandise. He caught the crime on camera.
“The first thing that caught my attention was how little the driver was, barely came up to the mirror on that Kia. It was a little kid driving that thing," said Knudson.
Several other victimized business owners have shared their frustrations about the crime pattern to News5 over the last few months. We reached out to the Colorado Springs Police Department (CSPD) and the Fourth Judicial District Attorney's Office to ask why this crime keeps happening.
Colorado Springs Police Chief Adrian Vasquez said most of the juvenile suspects arrested for the burglaries are back out on the streets after a court decides to release them pending trial. CSPD said officers have identified 19 juvenile suspects and arrested 11 juvenile suspects related to the smash-and-grabs. Police said of the 11 arrested, four are still being held in a youth detention facility.
The Division of Youth Services says a juvenile will be held in a detention facility if they're considered a high risk to others or a flight risk. Once in detention, the juvenile will appear in front of a judge within 48 hours to determine next steps. Chief Vasquez said a judge will often release the juvenile back home while they wait for the court process to play out.
"It's going to be pretty quick that they're going to be released," said Chief Vasquez. "When we go back and recontact them and rearrest them, they are so often telling our detectives, 'Okay, yeah. I'll be out and I'll be doing this again tomorrow.'"
Chief Vasquez said because burglaries are property crimes, they're thought of as less violent and typically would not send a juvenile to detention. However, he points to a specific issue within the juvenile justice system as one reason why some prolific teenage offenders can continue committing crimes: youth detention bed space.
In 2003, Colorado legislators set a 479-bed cap on juvenile detention facilities. Over the years, the statutory cap has been cut by more than half and now stands at 215 beds. The Pikes Peak Region is allocated 27 beds at Zebulon Pike, the youth detention facility in Colorado Springs.
“With less bed space and more crime, it makes no sense," he said. "It doesn't match what we're seeing here on the ground. It just simply doesn't."
The Division of Youth Services said there's been a 28% increase in juvenile arrests in the state from 2021 to 2023.
Fourth Judicial District Attorney Michael Allen shares the same concerns as Chief Vasquez. Allen said the youth detention facility in Colorado Springs is often at capacity and rarely has space for new offenders.
"What we know now is that we're almost always operating at capacity, meaning that there's always 27 kids in custody. So if a kid commits a violent offense and is put into custody pending trial, that means another kid has to be pushed out of the other side and back into a home life that's not supportive and law-abiding," said District Attorney Allen.
He said he's working with other district attorneys across the state to push legislation that would raise the youth detention bed cap. In its quarterly meeting last week, the Colorado Youth Detention Continuum (CYDC) Advisory Board voted to recommend legislators increase the bed cap from 215 to 252 beds. The CYDC advisory board is made up of 27 members who work in the juvenile justice system in Colorado.
However, District Attorney Allen said he knows raising the bed cap will be a tough fight. State Representative Lindsey Daugherty, a Democrat representing Adams and Jefferson counties, sponsored a bill in 2021 that lowered the juvenile detention cap from 327 to 215 beds. She said the reason Colorado is hitting the bed cap is that facilities are holding on to low-risk juveniles who should be let out.
"If we increase the bed caps, what we're saying is that we as a society and legislators have not figured out a better way than to detain our juveniles, which I have a really, really big issue with," said Rep. Daugherty.
A report publishedby the Colorado Department of Human Services shows one out of three youth detained in the second half of 2022 were screened to be low risk, meaning their risk of re-offending was also low.
As the smash-and-grab crime trend continues in Colorado Springs, business owners are doing what they can to protect their stores. Some have installed concrete bollards in front of their stores and others said they're parking their vehicles in front of their shops overnight. Chief Vasquez said gun shop owners should take extra safety measures and lock up guns in safes before closing.
Steven Kinder, a manager at Spartan Defense gun store on the northeast side of the city, said suspects stole 15 guns from the store after smashing through it in August.
“We have steel roll-downs on every opening of the building, but the steel roll-downs came right off the wall with a car," he said. "This is a very, very, very serious thing that they're doing. It's incredibly dangerous for them and for anyone else who gets involved, and for the state of Colorado to treat it as more of a nuisance is, again, frustrating."
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