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A Denver grand jury last week indicted 13 men and women aged 18 to 23 who were members of a criminal street gang for alleged crimes involving 113 victims.

Prosecutors with the Denver District Attorney’s Office have opened court cases against each, city officials said in a Tuesday news release announcing these organized crime indictments on 255 felony counts.

The group is accused of violating Colorado’s Organized Crime Control Act and being responsible for 18 shootings. Among those were drive-by shootings that put innocent people at risk, prosecutors say.

One shooting led to the homicide of Jesus Duran-Maldonado in Commerce City on Feb. 26, 2022. Another homicide victim was Christian Chirinos-Salazar in Denver on May 28. In addition to charges in the two homicides, the defendants face charges on multiple counts including attempted homicide, aggravated motor vehicle theft, assault, menacing, and robbery.

An anti-violence team of metro Denver police agencies, RAVEN task force, that targets organized violent crime, including the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, investigated the crimes.

“We believe these individuals shared a common goal of committing violence primarily against their rival gang members to gain notoriety, credibility, and perceived dominance over both their neighborhood,” a statement from Denver District Attorney Beth McCann said.

Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas issued a statement saying that “removing these alleged violent offenders from our streets again demonstrates our ongoing commitment to holding accountable the most serious offenders causing harm in our neighborhoods.”

The 13 defendants facing prosecution are Ali Fernando Lozano, 23; Anastasia Marie Gomez, 19; Angel Adrian Espinoza, 20; Brandon Mark Santana, 18; Emiliano German Nunez, 20; Gilberto Ulisses Torres-Pacheco, 18; Gloria Reyes, 18; Ismael Gabriel Roque, 20; Isser Daniel Mejia-Michael, 20; Jessie Anthony Vargas-Vigil, 21; Nevaeh Jordyn Alvarado, 20; Ricardo Corchado, 19; and Yacob Fonseca, 20.

Police agencies are still investigating and officials declined to release additional information.

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The late addition of an amendment to a bill expanding a free transit ridership program established last year has some officials concerned about how it could reduce funding for projects in Colorado’s rural communities.

House Bill 23-1101 was meant to expand opportunities for transit agencies to participate in the state’s Free Fares for Clean Air program, but an amendment from bill sponsor Sen. Faith Winter, a Westminster Democrat, has some people questioning the constitutionality of the legislation.

The amendment, which Winter indicated on Feb. 27 came at the request of the Colorado Department of Transportation, would require the state Transportation Commission to change how Transportation Planning Regions are drawn with more of an emphasis on population.

These groups consider projects within the region, and 10 of them are represented on the larger Statewide Transportation Advisory Committee, which makes recommendations to the Transportation Commission about where funding should flow. The other five are Metro Planning Organizations.

Steamboat Springs City Council member Heather Sloop, who chairs the five-county Northwest TPR and is vice-chair of the Statewide Transportation Advisory Committee, sounded an alarm about the amendment at council’s meeting on Tuesday, March 7.

“This could kill all rural TPRs in rural Colorado,” Sloop said. “Our voice would be silenced.”

The bill had already passed the Colorado House before the amendment was added without discussion during a Senate Transportation and Energy Committee meeting on Feb. 27.

State Sen. Dylan Roberts, a Democrat from Avon who does not sit on that committee, bucked his party to vote against the bill with 10 Republicans in the Senate, but it still passed 23-11 on March 3.

That sent it back to the House, where a vote on whether to accept the Senate’s amendments or send it to conference committee to iron out differences has been delayed. Roberts, who represents Routt County in the state Senate, said he is concerned about how this could impact rural transportation funding and how this amendment was brought up.

“We have a rule in the Colorado Legislature that bills need to stay confined to a single subject as defined by the title of the bill,” Roberts said. “It clearly does not fit under the title of the bill, which is a much more narrow topic.”

In a statement to Steamboat Pilot & Today, CDOT Communications Director Matt Inzeo defended the amendment, saying it is “fundamentally inaccurate” to say the purpose of this is to take funding or representation away from rural communities.

“In fact, this amendment helps rural Colorado,” Inzeo said.

Pressed to explain why CDOT pursued the amendment as part of this bill, Inzeo said the conversation about allowing transit agencies to be voting members in TPRs was talked about last summer, and when TPRs were mentioned in this bill, it created an opportunity to make more changes.

“Once TPRs were a subheading of the bill, the opportunity presented itself for other TPR language as the bill moved to the Senate,” Inzeo wrote in an email. “The live dynamics of a legislative session become a lot about opportunity, and this one presented itself.”

Roberts said the introduction of the amendment was done “less than transparently” and it is “causing a good bill to become a major problem.”

“It’s definitely outside the norm of the way we normally do things at the legislature of sticking very strict to the single subject rule,” Roberts said. “If we want to have that conversation about redrawing TPRs, I believe it should be done in a separate bill with a full stake-holding process out in the open and the ability to get feedback all over the state.”

State Rep. Meghan Lukens, a Democrat from Steamboat Springs, said she hopes the amendment does not pass the House and she is advocating for significant changes.

“We should have these discussions separately and not tie them together in this unrelated legislation, which is intended to improve a successful ozone transit grant program that funds free rides on public transit,” Lukens said.

Despite CDOT’s assertion the amendment is proper for the bill, former state Rep. Diane Mitsch Bush has argued it’s unconstitutional.

In an email on Wednesday, an official in Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser’s office said they were not asked to weigh in on the constitutionality of the bill after the amendment was added.

“Given this amendment’s potential violation of the Colorado Constitution’s single subject requirement, our office is presently weighing its ability to defend HB23-1101 in court if and when it is challenged as unconstitutional,” said Lawrence Pacheco, chief communications officer for the state attorney general.

Still, not everyone across the state is opposed to revisiting the structure of TPRs, and it isn’t a divide solely between rural and urban Colorado.

After sending questions to CDOT, the Steamboat Pilot & Today received two unsolicited calls from officials that are open to or support the amendment. Glenwood Springs Mayor Jonathan Godes said he doesn’t believe the TPR that includes his community, the Intermountain TPR, has served them well.

Godes said he wasn’t familiar enough with the legislative rules to comment on the process in which the amendment was added, but he believes a larger conversation is needed.

While the Intermountain TPR has the same representation on Statewide Transportation Advisory Committee as others, the Intermountain TPR represents two to three times as many people. The Intermountain TPR includes about 169,000 residents, where others like the South Central TPR include less than 21,000.

“I don’t want to fight or have a zero-sum game with the rest of the rural communities,” Godes said. “It feels like we need to make things among rural Colorado an open, honest conversation about what geographic areas still make sense since these boundaries were drawn up 30 years ago.”

Larimer County Commissioner Kristen Stevens said she supports the amendment’s concept, adding that the Upper Front Range TPR includes vastly different communities such as Estes Park and Fort Morgan.

“We’re talking about a mountainous rural community that’s lumped in with a very Eastern Plains community,” Stevens said. “I think there’s some myths about what this amendment would do, and I don’t think the idea is to throw everything away or not have rural representation.”

Inzeo said the purpose of the amendment is to “start the public process to take a fresh look at these boundaries and make sure all residents of rural Colorado are getting fair representation in the transportation planning process.”

But Mitsch Bush said the TPRs were never designed to be based on population because many parts of the state have a disproportionately larger share of the state’s roads. These roads are vital to resort economies and are used by more than rural residents, she said.    

“Colorado’s economy, I think, will be harmed by this in that we are already trying to compete with Utah that has much more transportation funding than we do, has far better roads than we do,” Mitsch Bush said.

Roberts said he hopes the Senate amendments will be rejected by the House, forcing a conference committee that he hopes will strip the bill of the amendment. If the bill passes, Roberts said, the next course of action would be to ask Gov. Jared Polis to veto it.

Asked whether Polis is considering using that power, a spokesperson for the governor’s office said, “The governor will review bills as they move through the process and is confident CDOT and our rural communities can resolve this issue.”

Forests, Vol. 14, Pages 663: Analysis of Spectral Separability for Detecting Burned Areas Using Landsat-8 OLI/TIRS Images under Different Biomes in Brazil and Portugal

Forests doi: 10.3390/f14040663

Authors:
Admilson da Penha Pacheco
Juarez Antonio da Silva Junior
Antonio Miguel Ruiz-Armenteros
Renato Filipe Faria Henriques
Ivaneide de Oliveira Santos

Fire is one of the natural agents with the greatest impact on the terrestrial ecosystem and plays an important ecological role in a large part of the terrestrial surface. Remote sensing is an important technique applied in mapping and monitoring changes in forest landscapes affected by fires. This study presents a spectral separability analysis for the detection of burned areas using Landsat-8 OLI/TIRS images in the context of fires that occurred in different biomes of Brazil (dry ecosystem) and Portugal (temperate forest). The research is based on a fusion of spectral indices and automatic classification algorithms scientifically proven to be effective with as little human interaction as possible. The separability index (M) and the Reed–Xiaoli automatic anomaly detection classifier (RXD) allowed the evaluation of the spectral separability and the thematic accuracy of the burned areas for the different spectral indices tested (Burn Area Index (BAI), Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR), Mid-Infrared Burn Index (MIRBI), Normalized Burn Ratio 2 (NBR2), Normalized Burned Index (NBI), and Normalized Burn Ratio Thermal (NBRT)). The analysis parameters were based on spatial dispersion with validation data, commission error (CE), omission error (OE), and the Sørensen–Dice coefficient (DC). The results indicated that the indices based exclusively on the SWIR1 and SWIR2 bands showed a high degree of separability and were more suitable for detecting burned areas, although it was observed that the characteristics of the soil affected the performance of the indices. The classification method based on bitemporal anomalous changes using the RXD anomaly proved to be effective in increasing the burned area in terms of temporal alteration and performing unsupervised detection without relying on the ground truth. On the other hand, the main limitations of RXD were observed in non-abrupt changes, which is very common in fires with low spectral signal, especially in the context of using Landsat-8 images with a 16-day revisit period. The results obtained in this work were able to provide critical information for fire mapping algorithms and for an accurate post-fire spatial estimation in dry ecosystems and temperate forests. The study presents a new comparative approach to classify burned areas in dry ecosystems and temperate forests with the least possible human interference, thus helping investigations when there is little available data on fires in addition to favoring a reduction in fieldwork and gross errors in the classification of burned areas.