I always thought Boulder police had the mellowest of police jobs.
They seemed to have two main challenges in their day: 1) stop drunk college students from vandalizing things and 2) help the homeless find their way to the services they need.
There was just enough work to keep the day interesting without being too dangerous like working in, say, Denver.
Boulder police are well integrated into the community. They meet with University of Colorado (CU) officials, fraternity and sorority organizations, and local schools. I often see cops talking casually to groups of homeless who camp or linger by Boulder Creek. The cops often know the homeless by name.
My perception about the ease of their job started to change a year ago. As the pandemic began to rage, CU shut down all classes and asked students to shelter in place or, better, go home. The students responded by throwing a massive street party to celebrate St. Patrick’s day. I saw that party. I saw six police officers within a single block attempting to corral the students and stop them from driving drunk, walking naked down the middle of the street, or jumping off a roof. The officers were NOT shutting down the house parties, just trying to prevent the chaos from spilling into the public sphere. I thought, that really sucks for those officers, who are now not only dealing with the drunken students but also facing the real possibility of contracting a deadly virus.
Just a couple weeks ago, a house party in the same area turned into a street riot. It sounded almost ridiculous— privileged white kids (CU has the highest percentage of 1%ers among the nation’s public colleges) raging against oppression. Oppression of what? Being politely asked to wear a mask in Starbucks? What limited restrictions that were imposed upon them were only lightly enforced, at best.
Ridiculous or not, they did create a situation of very real danger, destroying several cars during the hours-long riot. Ironically, most of the cars belonged to other college students. (To be fair, many CU students condemned the riot.) The armored vehicle that the police had proudly shown off at all the CU football home games rolled onto the street and proved as ineffective as some had predicted. Students quickly targeted the vehicle and threw rocks at it, breaking the reinforced windshield. Instead of quelling the anger, the intimidating, angular truck only inflamed it.
The riot should have been the biggest event of the year. As we all know now, it isn’t.
I am not personally a fan of the term “defund” in the “defund police” movement. Once past the soundbite, proponents of “defunding police” usually argue for re-allocating funds to create a variety of unarmed civil servant positions to handle a large portion of police duties in a less militant and less aggressive manner. Let the armed policeman handle a very narrow range of duties for which they are very well trained. Let other professionals from the fields of mental health, community organization, domestic abuse, social work, and so forth handle many of the less life-threatening encounters.
I am a teacher, and I have often seen the trials and challenges of the police through the perspective of the trials and challenges of teaching. The job does not pay enough. The job is very complex. The job is very stressful. It’s easy to make a mistake. It’s easy to make a mistake that can ruin someone’s life. But I am a professional. I take pride in my job. And when I am tired, stressed, under-trained and underpaid, the last thing I want to do is make a decision that could destroy someone’s life.
The simplest, clearest, easiest solution to education reform has always been more money. Either more money to provide the training and equipment teachers need to effectively do their jobs. Or more money to hire more teachers to create a much more manageable student-to-teacher ratio and boost the effectiveness of individualized learning. Or more money to make teacher salaries competitive with engineers and doctors, increasing the talent pool a school can draw from, increasing the respect that the community and parents give to the local teachers, and reducing the financial stress a teacher faces at the end of the day. Or all of the above.
(That’s not a 10% increase in funding, but a 300% to 400% increase.)
I see the solution to policing in the same light. More money can mean better training, less stressful workload, more specialists, more funds for community building. More money can mean more careful recruiting and vetting. More money can mean higher salaries, leading to a more competitive pool of candidates, less re-hires of bad actors, and stronger willingness amongst veterans to engage in uncomfortable trainings such as racial awareness. (More money should not mean buying more armored vehicles and other toys cast off from the military.) I imagine there are places in our country that would benefit far more from such improvements than our very affluent, mostly white town. Elijah McClain might still be alive if he had been confronted by a community organizer rather than two armed policemen.
None of these changes would have saved Eric Talley. As the first officer on the scene of the Boulder King Soopers shooting, he did what a cop with a gun is trained to do, and would still be trained to do no matter what reforms come to our police forces. He ran inside to save civilians. In this case, civilians meant mostly service workers who had made their own sacrifices over the past year as well as older residents who could shop in the middle of the afternoon or who had finally qualified for the vaccine.
No teacher signs up to keep study hall quiet, check hall passes, or be told that our job is easy because we get summers off. We sign up to help a kid discover a new passion, to open up new opportunities, to perform brilliant neurosurgery despite rusty tools and impossible conditions. Nor does a police officer sign up to hand out jaywalking tickets or arrest a drunk twenty-year-old for throwing a whiskey bottle through a window. They sign up for that moment when they can rush into danger and save innocent lives.
Both should be adequately compensated and supported for what they do and the risks they take. Too often public statements of support for their sacrifice (whether financial, familial, or ultimate) are followed by funding cuts that imply “that job is too easy to merit more pay.” The people who do difficult work in our communities need real fiscal, educational, and systemic support— the kind we all have to pay for with real policy changes and real money.
As the immediate shock of the King Soopers shooting wears off, the town is grappling with what it means, and it means a lot. Initially, reports circulated that King Soopers would open today, Monday. That did not happen. Won’t happen next week either. And, in reality, will likely never happen. The fence surrounding the parking lot has become a 100-meter-long memorial wall. The flowers have spilled over onto the sidewalk. A lane of the road has been closed to vehicles and opened to pedestrians. The police cars and uniformed officers on site look more like pallbearers than crowd control. Flags are at half mast, still. Most stores around town have displayed some sort of expression of mourning. Fire trucks are flying the blue stripe flag. Donovan Makha, DJ of Reggae Bloodlines which, at 43 years old, is one of the longest running radio shows in the nation, spent Saturday afternoon talking about the grocery store he once frequented and playing songs that fit the mood. In a Starbucks neighboring the CU campus, the chalkboard honors Officer Talley and a pandemic-closed table has become a makeshift shrine filled with “Thank You” cards. Many of the cards have been signed by CU students, perhaps some of the same students who threw rocks at the police a couple weeks before.
Anyway. I went to get gas. The gas station was closed. So I ended up walking around a memorial in a strip mall for a while. I can’t say I ever anticipated getting this emotional over a King Soopers.