Chief Debra Funston of the Rifle Police Department received an award in excellence in law on Jan. 9. She said she hadn’t known how big of a deal it was, but she was glad to be recognized at the ceremony in Denver. 

“I just felt really honored and really proud of what everybody is doing in law enforcement in Colorado,” Funston said. “This year will be 37 years for me in law enforcement and it was a really great time to look back on the many years of experiences and people I’ve met and gotten work with how proud I am of that and of my experience across the years.”

Funston started at 23 years old when she attended the Hampton Roads Regional Academy in Virginia. Following that, she worked for the Hampton Police for a few years and then she came back to Colorado, first to her hometown in Montrose. 

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“I worked there for 10 or 11 years and then from Montrose, I took a job in Steamboat, and I worked there from 2001 to 2010,” Funston recounted. “Then I started at Palisade PD in 2011, and I was hired on there to set up their investigations department there, because they didn’t have one, and I rose up to the rank of sergeant.”

Funston became the interim chief for the Palisade Police Department and worked there for about seven years before moving to Rifle and starting as chief of police for the Rifle Police Department in January 2022. 

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“(I’ve) been with Rifle for three years now and I love it and I just feel blessed to be in this profession this long, to meet all the people at work, all the people I’ve hopefully been able to help,” Funston said. 

Funston said she has a great team in Rifle: a hardworking, dynamic group that makes her life easier and she’s thankful for them. 

Even though she’s been in law enforcement almost all her life, there was a moment where she took a break.

“When I was in Steamboat, I was working as a school resource officer, and at the time, the chief was a public safety director, so he oversaw the fire department and police department,” Funston said. “I worked for the fire department for a couple years on public education.”

While she was there, the economic recession of 2010 came down and Funston was one of the 14 people let go from the Steamboat department. She then moved on to Palisade to become an investigator. 

“I’ve worked all positions,” Funston said. “I was part of a tactical team in Montrose, I worked patrol, I worked every shift at some point, I was part of investigations, I really like that.”

Funston was also a field training officer, a DARE officer and school resource officer. 

“I always advise young officers to take every opportunity because then it widens the scope of their experience and what they’re able to do,” Funston said. 

Being a part of law enforcement for so long, Funston remembers when they didn’t make clothing for female officers. 

“I remember getting the smallest pair of men’s shoes and wearing two pairs of tube socks just to make the shoes fit,” Funston said. “I had to get shirt stays to keep my shirt tucked in because men’s pants don’t have a waist and the belt was always too big.”

Since Funston started, she said policing for women and having appropriate clothing has come a long way and because of the adjustments they had to make for women in the force, it led to new configurations for men as well. 

“They’ve adjusted things so you don’t have to carry everything on a belt, they’ve moved it up to the vest,” she said. “Now we’re not wrenching our backs and sitting in a car and leaning on your gear all the time, so now there’s a lot of pressure taken off our hips and backs. It’s all getting better. I laugh about it now, the things that we went through.”

Funston also remembered that when officers would go through something traumatic back then, there wasn’t a lot of help available for them. 

“You just had to deal with it, because you had another case waiting,” Funston said. “I’m so glad there are resources available now for officers, because they can get that help now.”

Funston said she never believes an officer who says they’re not afraid. 

“There were some calls, sometimes car crashes, that were definitely scary,” she said. “Sometimes those calls lead to some trauma and maybe it doesn’t happen in the moment, but the next day, it might come crashing down and you suddenly think ‘what did I just go through?'”

Officers, luckily, don’t just experience trauma, but sometimes they get calls and find out that the people they’re helping are doing alright.

“There was a case while I was in Palisade, a sexual assault case, and it was ongoing. Finally, we caught the guy, and he was sentenced 15 to life,” Funston said. “The father of the girl sent me updates on how she was doing.”

Funston said she hopes for a good ending, not necessarily a happy one, because the events police help people through aren’t happy. She just hopes the best for those people. 

“I’ve had people thank me for arresting them, too,” Funston said. “They’d call later and say ‘thank you for setting me on the right track’ because that arrest woke them up to the things they were doing.”

Funston believes that people aren’t bad as a whole, because there are good and bad experiences, but there are moments of exasperation. 

“Sometimes it gets frustrating, seeing the same people getting brought in over and over,” she admitted. “Because we try to help people but we can’t help them if they don’t want to help themselves.”

Funston said she’s grateful for all the experiences she’s gone through. 

“I want to give all that credit to the people at the police department because they’re the boots on the ground, I’m just steering the ship,” Funston said. “Sometimes these awards help me know I’m doing alright, but the credit goes to my team.”

Funston also said that while she’ll have to hand off the torch of the Rifle PD sometime, she’s not planning on retiring in the next few years. 

“I’ve still got energy,” she said.