Colorado Sheriff’s Deputies Free Bear Locked in Car

By Quinn Libson,
Staff Correspondent

Connecting state and local government leaders

By Quinn Libson

| July 15, 2016

While it may seem like a puzzling riddle, this bear’s predicament is indicative of a growing problem.

Two police officers walk up to a locked car, and there’s a bear sitting inside.

No, it isn’t the start of a joke, it really happened in Jefferson County, Colorado—west of the city of Denver.

The sheriff’s deputies that responded to this unusual call filmed the entire encounter with the bear and posted it to YouTube.

In the video, the officers walk up to a silver Subaru, and one of them wonders aloud: “How did he get in, I don’t see a broken window.”

The bear is eventually freed in a somewhat harrowing moment of the video, when one of the deputies simply opens up the trunk and backs away, letting the small bear run off into the woods.

According to Jenny Fulton, the public information officer for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s office, the bear managed to get into the closed but unlocked car in the early hours of July 11. The bear then proceeded to claw the interior of the car almost beyond recognition—destroying the door handles in the process—effectively locking itself in.

While the case of a bear in a locked car may seem more like a strange riddle than a reality, these types of encounters are likely to become more frequent.

Taking into account a rapid expansion of human infrastructure along Colorado’s Front Range—in combination with black bear foraging habits that have grown to include garbage, livestock, crops, and pet food—and add in weather events that limit the bears’ natural food supplies, and you have what Colorado Parks and Wildlife calls a “perfect storm” of increasing human-bear interactions and conflicts.

As CPW notes, “black bear conservation remains one of North America’s greatest wildlife management success stories.” As these bear populations thrive, the task of mitigating human-bear interactions will become a more and more pressing issue.

Quinn Libson writes for Government Executive’s Route Fifty.

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