Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [114]
It’s not that Boulder is unique that way. What is different is this “Magic Kingdom” business. People who practice law here like to live here. For the most part, they confine their practice to Boulder. They don’t even like to go to Denver. Boulder is small; the legal community is small.
That’s where Pete Hofstrom comes in. There’s no question he regards his job as deal-making. He’s utterly honest. He’s not greedy, not selfish. He’s not looking to make a lot of money or run for governor. He says that it’s his job to make judgments about who deserves a good deal and who doesn’t.
He has told my law students that there are basically three kinds of people who will come to a prosecutor’s attention: one is the chronic fuckup—not really evil but unable to manage in today’s complicated world and therefore sees crime as an easy out; then there’s the hard-core criminal, a sociopath who’s greedy, selfish, doesn’t care about hurting people—someone with no conscience whatsoever; finally, there’s the citizen, a basically solid person with the right values, the right attitude, the right skills, who has now made a bad mistake.
Pete says you have to treat these three types differently, even if they’ve all committed the same crime. And he has confidence that he can unerringly place people in one category or the other. He understands that in his job, he pretty much has the power to determine the outcome even though it’s the judge who pronounces sentence. Pete is comfortable in that role and believes he’s perfectly capable of making these judgments.
—Marianne Wesson
The DA’s office was soon half a step ahead of Boulder, which often found itself several steps ahead of other cities. Hunter used his office to initiate community programs. Having set up a consumer protection unit and a victim assistance program, he established a crime-prevention education program for all public school children called Safe Guard, a safehouse for domestic violence prevention, and a restitution-collection program for victims of crimes.
Hunter worked closely with Chuck Stout of the Boulder Health Department on the AIDS threat and supported the department’s controversial needle-exchange program for addicts. When a drug bust netted the county over half a million dollars, he agreed that the money should be used for the education of teen mothers who were at high risk for becoming child abusers. The resulting Genesis program won a Ford Foundation award in 1996.
Hunter was way ahead of the curve in inaugurating and supporting such programs. He said he wanted to be innovative because Boulder expected it of him.
Boulder is a unique city. And Alex Hunter’s strength in staying in office for twenty-five years is his identifying with the community—not in shaping the forces of the community, but in following them and anticipating what Boulder wants from a prosecutor. That is quite different from what most communities in this state want from a prosecutor.
Boulder has been a kind of magnet for different philosophies, ideas, and academics. It’s always changing. It’s a kind of Disneyland, Colorado, where you don’t have to be at all concerned about the mundane part of life. You kind of just let it flow and things are taken care of. In Boulder, you can live in a world of ideas.
Hunter listens well and surrounds himself with good people. He doesn’t believe he’s 90 percent and everyone else is only 10 percent. He’s a consensus builder, both in his job and in his political life. And again, I say he’s in tune with the dynamics of his community.
Boulder lacks poverty, it lacks a ghetto—at least as a geographic entity. But there are pockets of low-income folks in the Boulder community, and there’s a hell of a lot of diversity. It’s racial, ethnic. But even the low income is at a higher level than you would normally think of in terms of a ghetto.
Alex doesn’t fancy himself as a trial lawyer, and his ego isn’t fed in the courtroom. His ego is fed in the political arena.
—Robert Grant
The Boulder City Council is, in many ways, responsible