City Hall goes pro in its public safety hire

Commerce City’s new public safety chief — who has been serving as interim police chief — brings an impressive resumé to his latest post. 

Rick Myers, who started Monday as the director of public safety for the Commerce City Police Department, has a career in public safety that spans more than four decades, including as a police chief or interim chief in eight different jurisdictions in six states. He even has led Colorado’s second-largest police department, as noted in Commerce City’s official announcement of the hire:

Myers was chief of police for the Colorado Springs Police Department and its nearly one thousand personnel from 2007 to 2011. He then started a police consulting firm and has mostly resided in Colorado since that time, except for one year as interim chief in Sanford, Fla. and nearly four years as chief in Newport News, Va.

His credential are impressive, too:

He spent nine years (2009-2017) on the board for the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA), serving as president/chair starting in 2015. Myers spent two years (2017-2019) as executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) and is currently an executive fellow for the National Policing Institute (NPI)….Myers holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Michigan State University, where he has been honored on the MSU Criminal Justice Alumni Wall of Fame. 

And:

Myers has graduated from all three of the FBI’s leadership programs: FBI National Academy (1989), FBI Law Enforcement Executive Development Seminar (1992), and the FBI National Executive Institute (2008).

All of which means he will have plenty of expertise to draw on in helping select the city’s next police chief. That search already is underway, including a solicitation for a professional recruiting firm to conduct the process.

Myers had been serving as Commerce City’s interim chief since July 2022. That’s when the previous chief, Clint Nichols, retired amid controversy over working remotely from Las Vegas as well as over a traffic stop in which he was pulled over by law enforcement in Utah.