Jeremiah Polucha stepped into his new role as a commander at the Estes Park Police Department this month. The twenty-year veteran of the Town’s police department had served as the interim operations captain since 2022 and, before that, held the rank of sergeant.
According to Polucha, from an organizational chart perspective, a commander in the EPPD is akin to being a field general who reports to the chief and has both operational and administrative duties.
Polucha, along with Rick Life, the other department commander, supervises day-to-day operations, manages policing and public safety during Estes Park’s special events such as parades, arts festivals, and rodeos, and oversees emergencies.
In a town with a local population of just under 6,000 that can swell to tens of thousands on a summer or special event day, the EPPD has to nimbly pivot from routine patrol work to managing a natural disaster or a critical incident, Polucha said.
The EPPD uses quieter times, when there are fewer visitors in town, to plan and work through contingency scenarios. To prepare for the unexpected, Polucha attended an incident command training program this past week and will attend the next level of the program in April.
And because of the nature of policing in a small community like Estes Park, the EPPD has mutual aid agreements with other area law enforcement agencies, including the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office and Rocky Mountain National Park, to provide additional support when needed.
Polucha grew up in Loveland and went to Loveland High School. He attended Fort Lewis College in Durango. During his junior year, he studied abroad in New Zealand. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, he returned to Wellington and enrolled in the Royal New Zealand Police College, a five-month program. He was stationed in South Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, and assigned to the busiest precinct.
Polucha described his experiences there as exciting, and while police officers in New Zealand are not likely to deal with a suspect brandishing a gun as they might in the U.S., on a daily basis, they encounter people who carry machetes.
“Where I policed, there were very large Māori and Pacific Island communities, and a lot of them have machetes that they use for cutting their meat, that they use for cutting their hair and their grass. And these are indigenous communities, and when they get the alcohol or the kava going, or whatever, then the machetes come out. I went to a lot of calls like that,” said Polucha.
In 2006, after two years, he returned to Colorado and applied to several law enforcement agencies in northern Colorado. “Estes was the first to say yes to a patrol position,” said Polucha. The Town sent him to the Law Enforcement Academy at the Community College of Aurora.
In comparing the differences between policing in the two countries, Polucha said the tactics in the U.S. are geared more towards officer safety because there are so many guns in the United States, but investigation protocols, while similar, are in some ways more robust and detailed there, in part because it is a national police force. Officers in the U.S. also receive more on-the-job training in the field, said Polucha.
Over the past 20 years, Polucha has worked on fires and floods, crowd control, routine patrol, and crime investigations. While many of the arrests in Estes are for driving under the influence, there are also arrests for domestic altercations and for crimes that require detective work. Polucha said one member of the EPPD recently recovered more than $100,000 for an elderly fraud victim.
When not on duty, Polucha, who lives in Loveland, enjoys skiing with his teenage daughter and son in the winter and boating at Horsetooth Reservoir.