Michael Allen, a second-term elected district attorney from Colorado Springs, has announced a bid to run for state Attorney General as a Republican.
A Navy veteran and a Colorado native, Allen said on Monday that he is running because Colorado’s crime rate has caused higher prices in housing and insurance costs, and he hopes that as the state’s chief legal officer, he could curb that.
“I’ve seen firsthand the impact crime has had on Colorado,” Allen said in a candidate launch video.
His official launch party is Monday evening.
“While politicians focus on political lawsuits and ballooning budgets, I’ll bring common sense back to the attorney general’s office. Evil never rests," he continued. "The best defense against those who choose to do evil in our community is committed professional prosecution. I’ve made a career of delivering real justice.”
The state attorney general is seldom responsible for criminal prosecutions, though the office does run the statewide grand jury and can run bigger multi-jurisdictional cases involving drug crimes. The AG can also be appointed as a special prosecutor by the governor in certain cases or circumstances. The job primarily is defending the state’s civil interests in court, advising state agencies and working on behalf of the state’s residents through consumer protection investigations and lawsuits.
Current Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser, who is term-limited and running for governor, has sued or joined suits against the Trump administration some 50 times since last January for various reasons, including the administration trying to block funding to Colorado and threats to get rid of birthright citizenship.
Allen is 53 and was born in Denver and graduated from Arvada West High School. He enlisted in the Navy out of high school and served eight years. He returned to Colorado and attended the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley and then went to law school at the University of Kansas. Allen took a job at a local Kansas prosecutor’s office and returned to Colorado in 2011 to join the Colorado Springs district attorney’s office. He was elected to the top job there in 2020 and won his re-election in 2024.
Colorado Springs is the state’s second-largest city and Allen has presided over a number of high-profile prosecutions, including the 22-year-old man who killed five people and injured another 25 in a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in 2022.
Allen charged the man with a hate crime as well as several first-degree murder charges and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Allen joins a fat roster of Democrats already vying for the state AG job, including Secretary of State Jena Griswold, Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty, federal prosecutor Hetal Doshi, and civil rights attorney David Seligman.
