By Shannon Lukens.

 

Steamboat Springs Police Chief is the guest DJ on Easy 94-1 on Wednesday afternoon. He has strong messages about: 

• 3:32 p.m. Mental Health
• 3:46 p.m. Police protection at large events like 4th of July
• 4:17 p.m. Local kids riding around on E-bikes and especially the dangers of E-Motorcycles
• 4:34 p.m. Steamboat Springs parents who are letting their kids drink illegally at parties 

 

Here are some of those comments, that you can hear this afternoon on Easy 94-1.

 

3:32 p.m. Mental Health. Chief Beckett recently wrote an editorial letter. Steamboat Radio posted it. 

July 3, 2025 — Chief Beckett has an important message on suicide in the Steamboat Springs Community

The letter was about our behavioral health crisis and unfortunately it came on the heels of  another teen suicide in our community last week. And I think what we really need to do is come together and, you know, I said it in the letter. I’ve been pretty vocal about it for some time now. We need to not let the emotion of this thing pass by and not normalize it. We need to do something more as a community and work with some of the great groups we have here.

The Hope Initiative. It’s really a collective of healthcare professionals, behavioral health folks, and the different nonprofits we have, the different groups that we have in our community and we’ve got some great ones. And they’re coming together to provide basically a peer team to our community. A resource for folks.

There will be a phone number and if someone’s having a rough day, if they need resources, if they need help with something, they’re not in crisis yet, they can reach out to the Hope Initiative, and they’ll be connected with a couple of community members who will meet with them, talk to them, go someplace safe with them, and just help them work through whatever they got going on so that they don’t end up in crisis.

And so that will be through Yampa Valley Community Foundation?

Yeah. Traci Hiatt is the one who’s, I don’t know if I want to say spearheaded because it really is a collective of, of groups, but she’s the one who’s gonna organize it and if anybody knows Traci, they know that she is phenomenal at doing stuff like this.

 

3:46 p.m. Police protection at large events like 4th of July

July 8, 2025 —SSPD Chief Beckett explains heavy police presence on the 4th of July

We’re waiting for the numbers to come back. We actually have the ability to track those things these days. But yeah, it wasn’t as big as we thought it was going to be, but there were still, I think, 6,000 to 8,000 people there. It was fairly well attended. Well, we, the police department, fire department, a lot of the city departments, transit, we all are part of a permitting process and we work with the vendors and the producers to make sure that the event is safe and it’s got the resources it needs and we were very successful this year.

And about at the parade, I see your cars parked at intersections and on both ends. Yeah, those are, that’s to prevent what we call vehicle intrusion. So if anyone unfortunately pays attention to especially international news, you’ve seen a lot of incidents across the world where vehicles drive into crowds. So we are very deliberate in trying to mitigate that and prevent that from happening here.

 

4:17 p.m. Kids riding around on E-bikes and especially the dangers of E-Motorcycles

June 4, 2025 — Steamboat Police are concerned about incidents with Electric Motorbikes and Motorcycles

We started talking about the youth and as Shannon and I were talking, a call came out of a report of a kid who was hit on an e-bike and it kind of brought to the forefront of my brain the message to our parents and the struggles we’re having right now with e-motorcycles. And folks, e-motorcycles are- they look like e-bikes but they’re not e-bikes, they are motorcycles. I’m here to tell you, everyone- I had a lot of people talk to me and say, ‘Sooner or later, a kid is going to get killed on one of these things.’ And they look to me for the answer and I’m gonna tell them and you the same thing I tell them.

The police department’s job is NOT to parent your kids. You have to take responsibility for your kids and I agree, sooner or later, a kid is going to get killed on one of these things and they are illegal, folks. You have to have a driver’s license, you have to have a license plate, they have to be registered with the DMV. If you haven’t done those things, those things are illegal.

I have directed my officers to start seizing them and you will have to come talk to me.

 

4:34 p.m. Parents who are letting their kids drink illegally at parties. 

We are gonna talk about our community youth and alcohol and the parents that allow it to happen.And when, when my officers show up, and my officers are getting yelled at from parents about, ‘You’re being too serious,’ or, ‘Is this really worth your time?’ Folks, when we talk about bigger picture issues like the behavior health crisis and all the other things going on in our community, a lot of it touches on substance abuse.

Our youth should not be drinking or taking drugs or doing things. They certainly shouldn’t be doing it with the permission of their parents. It’s at house parties. It’s in parking lots. We’ve got a group of kids at Soda Creek Elementary who are going there at nighttime and they think it’s funny to run from my officers, which is actually very serious and very dangerous. I want parents to be responsible for their kids.

It’s time to start doing the right thing for our youth.