DENVER — The Regional Transportation District (RTD) will soon launch its own detective bureau in an effort to prioritize public transportation crimes.

This is the latest move in RTD’s plan to address crime. Previous safety initiatives included leaving elevator doors open at stations, providing safety shields for drivers, and installing live cameras inside buses.

There are around 40 law enforcement agencies across RTD properties, which can often be busy with their own priorities and workloads.

“When it comes to crime on our transit system, we rely a lot on our partnerships with our surrounding agencies to assist in investigating those crimes,” said RTD Transit Police Department Commander Brian Cousineau.

In order to address crime on its own, RTD is creating its own detective bureau. The three detectives within the new bureau will focus entirely on crimes that impact RTD.

“By prioritizing those cases and saying, ‘Hey, this is important to us,’ we can make sure that we act on those investigations more promptly. Plus, depending on if we can establish a pattern of those crimes, then we can combine those cases, and now it changes it potentially from a misdemeanor case to a felony level case that we can file to a [district attorney’s] office,” said Cousineau.

It’s a concept already in place in other major cities like Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.

“I think before where they didn’t have the staffing levels to fully staff an investigations unit, they didn’t want to not do it correctly and not do it professionally. So now, with the staffing that we have, we can do that now,” said Cousineau.

According to Cousineau, RTD had less than 30 officers in 2023. There are currently 95 officers on staff, and RTD plans to add 55 more before the end of the year.

“Come back and ride the transit system. I think that you will be surprised to see that we are a more visible presence now than we were even a year ago,” said Cousineau in his message to travelers.

In the upcoming months, the detectives will collaborate with local law enforcement and district attorneys’ offices before fully launching their own investigations in May.

RTD launches new detective bureau to prioritize public transportation crimes