Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [165]
When officers from the Boulder Police Department Hill team arrived at the scene, a crowd charged their Suburban truck, smashing the windows and caving in the side of the truck, [Police Chief] Koby said.
“(The crowd) came right at them,” said Koby. “The crowd surged to upwards of 1,500, so we called for additional help.”
More than 100 officers from 10 agencies, including the Boulder police, the Boulder, Jefferson and Adams county sheriff’s departments, the Colorado State Patrol and police from Golden, Broomfield, Lafayette, Longmont and Louisville police departments—most clad in full riot gear—gathered on the Hill.
—Elliot Zaret
Daily Camera, May 4, 1997
This was not the first time there had been a ruckus on the Hill, a few blocks from the Ramseys’ house. The Hill was a lot like San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district of the 1960s. Since that so-called psychedelic revolution, recognizable hippie types had been camping out on University Hill’s sidewalks in front of coffee shops and clubs, while Boulderites and students from the CU campus, a few blocks away, hung out in the bars, record shops, and movie theater. The mixture of street people, students out for a good time, and alcohol was often combustible, and the Boulder police had opened a substation in the area.
Now Tom Koby, whose detectives were resentful that he hadn’t spoken up for them against the media attack on their handling of the Ramsey investigation, faced outrage from the rank and file. His officers were furious that Koby refused to let them respond as they saw fit to the rioters on May 2. At first he ordered them to stay out of sight. Then they were pelted with rocks.
There had been confrontations between the police and students over their underage and public drinking throughout the winter of 1996–97 and into the spring. In July 1990 the drinking age had been raised from eighteen to twenty-one because the governor believed it could save ten to fifteen lives a year and because the federal government threatened to withhold $27 million in highway funds if the age limit was not raised. In 1992 five hundred people had been involved in an incident where bottles, rocks, and burning branches were tossed at firefighters. More near-riots broke out in 1994, when three hundred people threw furniture and street signs into a bonfire and tossed bottles and rocks at police.
A week after the May 2 riots, the Boulder Planet, a weekly newspaper, quoted Koby as saying, “My officers would have been justified killing some of these young people.” Koby hailed the restraint of his officers during the riots and said that a lack of education about alcohol abuse was one cause of the disturbance. Two weeks later, the Rocky Mountain News took him to task in an editorial.
RIOTERS EARN EXPULSION
The University of Colorado has begun to expel and suspend some of the students arrested during the early May riots that endangered lives, injured dozens of people and cost the city and property owners hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The university is wise to move so fast in meting out punishment.
In this case, the most commonly cited cause—the city’s strict attitude toward underage drinking—was trivial, if it really existed at all in the minds of some rioters. As Boulder Police Chief Tom Koby has pointed out on several occasions, the rioters put lives at genuine risk.
Having said that, however, we do take issue with another of Koby’s remarks, whose melodramatic quotient was wild and irresponsible. The chief told the Boulder Planet that his officers would “have been justified in killing some of these young people…. Somebody attacks you with a lethal instrument, you have the right to use lethal force.”
Get a grip on yourself, chief. If Boulder officers had mowed down protesters with live ammunition it would have been a national scandal that would have ended more than a few careers.
Koby suggested that his officers, primed emotionally “to get in