Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [166]
At the end of May, the rank and file raised their grievances against Koby at a special union meeting. Regardless of his praising them in the newspaper, officers felt he had shown dismal leadership during the Hill riots. “Community policing” was the hot topic at the meeting. Officers claimed they were spending more time serving ice cream to kids than arresting criminals. It was an exaggeration, but they felt hampered in their ability to respond to the public’s needs.
As Steve Thomas listened to the arguments, he remembered an incident that spoke to the cops’ underlying resentment. In the hot summer of 1993, Boulder’s undercover narcotics detectives worked in stakeout vans videotaping the drug deals at Boulder’s San Juan Del Centro low-income housing units. At the same time, Koby was trying to clean up the city’s drug problem through education and meetings with community leaders.
Todd Sears, the lead detective, had edited down tens of hours of video into a catalog of San Juan’s dealers, which he planned to use in court. On a Friday, when the department was poised to arrest the some thirty dealers, none of them showed up. The street had cleaned itself up overnight. As Sears tried to figure out what had gone wrong, his supervising officer dropped on his desk the edited videotape he’d made. Eventually Sears discovered that Koby had, without his knowledge, shown it to police liaison Ron Brambila, a member of the minority issues coalition. For Sears, Koby’s action not only subverted the arrest of the drug dealers but violated police and union procedure, which stipulated that evidence cannot be made public during an ongoing investigation. According to Sears Koby may even have been involved in obstruction of justice. Sears filed charges against the chief with the department’s internal affairs sergeant, Mark Beckner. After an investigation, Sears’ allegations were sustained, and Koby’s boss and friend, city manager Tim Honey, was required to discipline him. In typical Boulder style, Honey ordered Koby to attend counseling with Honey and to explain his actions to the department’s officers. When the narcotics team eventually arrested the drug dealers, Ron Brambila, to whom Koby had originally shown the videotape, appeared in court to support one of the dealers.* Sears resigned from the Boulder PD shortly afterward.
The May 2 riots had brought long-simmering resentments to a boil. The rank and file were so fed up that no one attempted to defend the chief’s policies. One union official later said that the Boulder officers had turned into a lynch mob.
Though they didn’t want to ask for Koby’s dismissal, the police did want to take a vote by secret ballot. Seventy-eight members voted no confidence, thirty-one opposed, and six abstained. The no-confidence vote had passed by two to one. Though union officials didn’t understand how their vote would be interpreted, the Boulder City Council would see it as a sign that the rank and file wanted Koby removed.
Within days of the meeting, the press reported that city manager Tim Honey was on his way out. According to the Rocky Mountain News: “Honey’s performance recently has been criticized by at least four of Boulder’s nine council members…. Honey’s critics on the council have voiced concern about personnel issues. Honey also had defended police chief Tom Koby, who this week lost a vote of confidence conducted by the Boulder Police Benefit Association.”
For six years, Tim Honey, with a master’s degree in political science from Georgetown University, had seemed to be the perfect city manager for politically progressive Boulder. Its leaders thought of themselves as innovators, looking for solutions to the complex issues facing local governments. Honey was hired to bring stability, vision, and direction to what some local residents called Utopia.