The Denver Police Department is the gang that couldn’t file straight. Its intelligence bureau should be renamed The Stupidity Bureau. Six months after the American Civil Liberties Union stumbled upon the existence of the DPD’s secret surveillance records of citizens — the so-called “spy files” — the bureau still can’t…
When I moved to Denver, some of the town’s top cops were tooling around in Caddys provided by Elvis Presley, the about-to-burn-out star to whom they’d provided not just security, but honorary police status, complete with badge and uniform. The Denver Police Department was just a decade removed from its…
On September 3, you can learn whether you’re on the city’s most exclusive list: a roster of people and organizations in the Denver Police Department’s intelligence files. Some of those on Denver’s second most exclusive list — the cast of characters considering a run for Denver mayor in 2003 –…
Last month, State Farm sent a memo to its Colorado agents and employees. The subject was Alan Prendergast’s June 27 Westword story, “Hidden Damage,” which followed the insurance travails of Sunserea McClelland — and the trial that resulted in her winning a $1.8 million jury verdict against State Farm in…
Around the Fourth of July, Alison “Sunny” Maynard opened a letter from the Independence Institute. “Congratulations on your candidacy!” think tank president Jon Caldara told the Green Party candidate for Colorado attorney general. “To assist you in learning about the many issues facing Colorado, you are invited to a ‘Candidates’…
The biggest danger we face this July Fourth is not illegal fireworks, not the terrorist threat, but a menace even now confronting us at picnics and in parks across this sweltering city. The lost boys. Those elusive private parts intent on escaping the confines of men’s shorts and going so…
“In the name of Allah,” begins the handwritten pleading filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on April 26, “I, slave of Allah, Zacarias Moussaoui, by self representation for every rational vital reasons set in the memorandum accompanying this motion, move for immediate order directing that…
Last year, Rick Ashton, the director of the Denver Public Library, strongly suggested that all 500 DPL employees read Who Moved My Cheese?, the still-chart-topping, still completely inane business book that describes how two littlepeople, Hem and Haw, follow mice in their hunt for cheese, and in the process learn…
As you waited in supermarket checkout lines with your hotdogs and chips this past Memorial Day weekend, you could have picked up the Globe and found out how Frank Gifford was banned from his bedroom by Kathie Lee; you could have studied J. Lo’s barely clad backside; you could even…
Plutonium lasts forever…or close enough. Certainly the stories surrounding Rocky Flats, the now-defunct nuclear-weapons plant sixteen miles northwest (and that means upwind) of Denver, are never-ending. The most controversial current chapter involves the six tons of weapons-grade plutonium scheduled for transport to South Carolina, so that the last phase of…
They speak from the bookshelves. “What’s going on?” murmurs Greg Lopez, the Rocky Mountain News columnist killed in a hit-and-run six years ago, when he was just 35. Some of his best columns — and there are many — are collected in a volume whose name echoes Lopez’s trademark greeting,…
Denver remains the Sally Field of cities. “You like us, you really like us!” we cry out in gratitude whenever anyone pays us the slightest bit of attention. Best city for pets? We’re there. Best city for bikes? Ditto. Biggest laundromat? Then-congresswoman Pat Schroeder offered that sop back in the…
Somewhere down the slope was my father, happily unaware that I’d wrapped myself around one of Winter Park’s historic trail signs. We were carving out our own piece of history. Forty years before, my father had introduced me to Colorado, and skiing (not that the two can be separated), on…
The new year was barely a day old when a city truck appeared out of the pre-dawn murk on my northwest Denver street. Minutes later, it had left a calling card for one of my neighbors: a Denver boot, clamped to the left front wheel of the car. It was…
According to the Peter Principle, a business theory formulated by Canadian Lawrence Peters back in 1968, in a hierarchy, people tend to rise to the level of their incompetence. But in Boulder, that earnest, non-hierarchical community in the shadow of the Flatirons, people rise far higher than that. Like so…
Wes McKinley has never washed a vehicle. A horse, yes. But in the arid southeastern corner of Colorado where he lives, “washing a truck is a waste of water,” McKinley says. “A waste of precious liquid.” Out in Walsh, just sixteen miles from the Oklahoma border, they talk a lot…
“I’m not comfortable at this point becoming part of the story,” Brian Maass told Denver City Council’s DIA committee meeting Tuesday morning. Too late! The Channel 4 reporter has been a part of the story since well before Maass’s station actually aired his first report on DIA security last Thursday…
Those blue beacons lighting up the Denver skyline must emit mysterious waves that hypnotize everyone in sight. How else to explain why, when several states are raising holy hell about Qwest’s latest efforts to monitor your phone habits, interrupt your dinner and spill your private data, it’s been relatively quiet…
Colorado got a glimpse of hell with Columbine. It also showed Coloradans what it takes to start making your way back from the abyss: money, and lots of it. And then still more money to manage the money. “It costs money to give money away,” says Phil Nash, director of…
Without all the flag-waving, nobody would have noticed the penises. After all, they’d hung in the Canyon Gallery of the Boulder Public Library for three weeks before the library received its first complaint about “Hanging ’em Out to Dry,” one of fifty pieces included in Art Triumphs Over Domestic Violence,…
Shhh! No complaining in the library! Or about the library. Last November, the Denver Public Library proudly announced it had been named the top library in the nation. Its new building had already snagged national awards, it had recently fended off the evil Dr. Laura (“The Doctor Is Out,” September…
In the middle of October, James Goodwin, a 34-year veteran of United Airlines who’d spent the last two years as chairman and CEO, sat down and composed a letter to his troops. As a rallying cry and a sign of confidence in this country, it was only slightly less inspiring…
