Trinidad Police Department Moves Weekly Blotter to Official City Website

The Trinidad Police Department's weekly blotter, long distributed through the third-party platform CrimeWatch, moved to the City of Trinidad's official website on March 23, pulling a public record that tracks roughly 15,000 calls for service each year onto a municipally controlled server for the first time.

CrimeWatch posted an advisory notifying readers of the change and linking directly to the department's new blotter page, where residents can sign up for subscription alerts. The department, which employs 23 sworn officers across Trinidad's streets, now manages both the publication schedule and the subscriber list without routing either function through an outside vendor.

The shift carries two immediate practical consequences. Blotter records hosted on the city's official domain are less vulnerable to disappearing behind a third-party platform's policy changes or service interruptions, strengthening the archival case for anyone who tracks property crime trends, vehicle trespasses, or missing-person advisories over time. Subscription alerts, now issued directly from the city, eliminate the relay that previously stood between the department's releases and residents' inboxes.

The blotter's content remains bounded by the Colorado Open Records Act and the Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act, the same statutes that governed publication on CrimeWatch. Juvenile identities, certain medical-call details, and sexual-assault victim information are withheld by law; blotter entries will continue to carry call types, general locations, and non-sensitive details rather than full narrative reports.

For residents or reporters who need documentation beyond a summary entry, written public-records requests filed with the Trinidad Police Department under CORA or CCJRA are the formal route to full incident files, subject to statutory redactions. If a blotter entry that appeared on the city site later becomes inaccessible, that records-request process is also the remedy: Colorado law requires the department to respond within three business days and to cite a specific exemption for any withheld material.

The weekly blotter page is now available on the Trinidad Police Department section of the City of Trinidad website.