Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [124]
In the process, Koby got rid of many of the law-and-order-oriented officers that his predecessor, Jay Propst, had hired over the years from other jurisdictions. Commanders like Jerry Hoover, Glen Kaminsky, and Bob Etzkorn left the department. In their place, Koby brought in more liberally educated officers, and added laypeople like Virginia Lucy and Kris Gibson, who had no practical law enforcement experience, to the command structure. Almost all of Koby’s recruits were more open to Boulder’s unusual system of justice. Up through the ranks came people like Commander Mark Beckner, Tom Wickman, Linda Arndt, Tom Trujillo, and Carey Weinheimer—officers who had virtually no experience with big-city crime. There were deep divisions within the department about how to deal with Boulder’s criminals.
Koby had also moved the department toward community policing, a concept the city council approved, in light of the low street-crime rate in Boulder. Community policing emphasizes officer interaction with the public. The union objected that such “socializing” disrupted real police business—intervention in assaults, rapes, and the like. The hard-line officers didn’t like “sitting around at ice cream socials.” That wasn’t why they’d become cops.
The union contract stipulated that officers would be rotated rather than kept in core positions. This meant that the position of detective was not a permanent rank, not a promotion, but a rotating job. When an officer was rotated out, it wasn’t a demotion. There was no stigma in being sent “back to patrol.” As the union saw it, more officers gained detective experience this way, and it raised morale. Patrol officers rotated into the detective division got their turn at the benefits that went with the job. They worked five days a week and got Christmas, New Year’s, and Thanksgiving off. With one or two murders a year, the city of Boulder didn’t need seasoned homicide investigators, the police union said. As a result, these rotating detectives never developed expertise.
Sheriff Epp thought that the Boulder PD’s mandate to enforce the law had taken second place to the union’s agenda. He himself ran his detective division in a more traditional way. Having gained a wealth of expertise in his eight years as a detective before becoming sheriff, he kept the majority of his officers in core positions. Some of his officers had been detectives for twenty years.
Epp felt that the union requirements benefited the police more than the public. Still, it was not union-stipulated matters that had prevented the Boulder PD from doing a good job on the Ramsey investigation. John Eller had to assume a share of the blame. From what Epp knew of Eller, it seemed that the commander didn’t work well with people. Union leaders admitted privately that Eller had acted rashly in suspending Larry Mason, for example. And he was impatient and abrupt. “I don’t have time to talk about it,” Eller would sometimes snap. “Go out and do it now!”
Epp shared these views. He also believed that the commander was looking for confirmation of his preconceptions about the Ramsey case. That he wanted answers was understandable, but Epp objected to his refusal to look at other scenarios.
In the first days of the investigation, Epp had been told by his officers that Eller couldn’t get organized. Of course, failure to secure the crime scene and failure to separate and interview the witnesses—including the Ramseys—could not be blamed entirely on Eller. The first officers at the scene had ignored or bungled procedures