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Colorado News Summary: Swatting, AI, Fire Updates Jack Armstrong
Headlines Tuesday August 26, 2025
Possible Swatting Incident at CU Boulder
University of Colorado police are investigating what they’re calling a swatting incident on the CU-Boulder campus that resulted in a shelter-in-place order.
The University issued the campus-wide shelter-in-place order just before 5pm yesterday, within minutes of getting reports of gunshots being fired just outside the Norlin Library. Campus police responded but found no victims or suspects, according to the Denver Post. The shelter-in-place was lifted at 6:17pm, according to the alerts.colorado.edu website.
Police remained in the area after the order was lifted.
The incident yesterday happened during the first full week of CU’s fall semester. The Denver Post says that other colleges and universities around the country have had similar incidents of swatting, which are false reports of serious crimes, including Villanova University and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Special Session Updates
Colorado lawmakers continue to grapple with the state’s nearly $800-million budget deficit.
The special session called by Governor Jared Polis has lasted five days, and while lawmakers have passed several measures to address the shortfall, the focus yesterday was on an Artificial Intelligence bill.
Throughout yesterday, Colorado lawmakers were designing a bill that would have been an overhaul of AI regulations signed into law by Governor Polis in May of 2024. The Denver Post described that law as focusing on discrimination risks when companies use Artificial Intelligence.
In a late night decision, Colorado Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez gutted the bill. The amended bill would delay the implementation of the bill by several months. Had it not changed, the regulations around AI would have gone into effect in February.
The plan there is to allow consumer-protection organizations, tech companies, and lawmakers time to refine the bill, as the new bill is to go into effect in June. Colorado lawmakers plan to amend the bill further in the state legislature’s regular session.
Boulder Homeless Plan
The City of Boulder has launched a new strategy aimed at its homeless population, one that takes a short-term approach for some of those it means to help.
The city’s Director of Housing and Human Services in Boulder is calling the new plan more cost-effective than earlier strategies while maintaining the same goal of preventing homelessness from growing in the community.
The new approach distinguishes the type of support given to people in Boulder with longer histories of homelessness, from those who haven’t been in the area long and aren’t likely to stay, according to Boulder Reporting Lab.
The plan calls for spending more on what they call “diversion” programs intended to help people get back on their feet, but not necessarily offering them subsidized housing. This help could be: car repair, reconnecting someone with relatives, covering a rent deposit, or providing a bus ticket out of Boulder
The strategy was developed by a Houston-based consulting firm that says many local unhoused people will not stay in Boulder County in the long term. That makes providing short-term services more practical.
The city has set a goal to end unsheltered homelessness within the next three years, by 2028. All of this is according to Boulder Reporting Lab.
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Wildfires
Rains and thunderstorms have brought the Lee fire burning on Colorado’s Western slope to 90 % containment. The Lee Fire has burned 137,758 acres, the burn area being 2 acres shy of making the Lee fire Colorado fourth largest wildfire. The storms have brought necessary moisture to the area, but fire officials are weary of lightning and strong winds.
In a briefing this weekend, Incident Commander Brent Olson said “Minimal work” remains to fully contain the wildfire.
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CSU Wildfire Rpt
Meanwhile, a new study by a researcher at Colorado State University reports that Wildfires in Colorado are bigger and more common than they were thirty years ago. KGNU’s Andraa Von Reports…
The CSU researcher analyzed wildfires that burned in Colorado between 1990 and 2023, according to Denver7. Ph.D candidate Thomas Giffourd found that a small number of fires during that period burned the most acreage, and that the top one percent of the biggest fires have accounted for half of all acres that burned.
Eight of the biggest wildfires, Gifford said, have happened over the last thirteen years, and three of those were in 2020.
While Colorado averaged about a dozen fires a year during the 1990s, he says the average number, in the current decade, has jumped to 72.
Gifford says that while fires, in and of themselves, should be considered ecologically necessary, recovering from the bigger and more intense fires of recent years are harder for ecosystems to. recover from.
Aurora ICE Conditions
Democratic members of Colorado’s Congressional delegation are itemizing problems at the Aurora immigration detention center, in a letter to the Trump administration.
The four democrats toured the ICE facility earlier this month. They’ve sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Acting Director Kristi Noem, stating that ICE personnel who accompanied them on their tour were not able to give them a lot of the information they asked for, according to Colorado Newsline. Instead, the ICE personnel told them to email their questions to ICE’s Office of Congressional Relations.
And that, the Colorado democrats said in their letter, causes delays, and prevents meaningful oversight.
The tour of the Aurora facility by Democrats Jason Crow, Joe Neguse, Diana DeGette, and Brittany Pettersen came in the wake of reports of water and air conditioning problems at the detention center.
They also want more information about the detainees being held there, including their countries of origin. They said they want answers to their questions by September 5th.
