This is one of my interviews I did in 1985 for my manuscript describing events in Boulder in the ’60s and ’70s.  I donated the cassette tapes of the interviews  to the Carnegie Library in Boulder along with the signed documents granting me permission to use these interviews for a book, which I never got around to publishing.  I decided at this late stage to post the text of the interviews on my website. — S. Byron Gassaway

 

Al Staehle

Al Staehle of the Boulder County Sheriff’s Department gave a fascinating account of the demonstrations against the bombing of Cambodia and the riot on University Hill. He also had some interesting insights into the flower children and the STP Family.

I think the second riot, the ’72 riot (after Nixon ordered the bombing of Cambodia) was more politically based and had more general support from people who felt that they had a legitimate cause behind it. The first one, I think, was just the unrest on University Hill – and there were just lots of people hanging out on the streets in that concentrated area. There was pressure by the police on moving on –just a lot of tension between the community and the people up there.

Most of them weren’t students. People claimed that the students caused all of this, but it was more this group of people who by then had sort of lost the idealistic element and some of the more exploitive-types were left behind.

I don’t remember what the incident was that prompted it, but someone observed that it was “just the thing to do.” Once it started, it was like a pack of wild animals. People’s behavior became a mob mentality in that they really lost their individual functioning.

We brought in a professor of sociology and psychology and, I’m trying to think if he was English, but I don’t remember his name, but he really helped us to understand the phenomenon that took place. It was like animals running in a pack. People in a mob lose their individual identity and just go along with whatever sort of momentum there is. And that was very much what was happening – trashing cars, smashing windows, and throwing bricks.

On the second night, the only serious thing that I think could have caused some problems was that people had taken all day to make Molotov Cocktails. They had filled beer bottles up with gasoline and put wicks in them and stuff and were throwing those at the cops.

I was sort of on the perimeter, back where the the spectators were on the second night. I think most of the people were in the spectator mode that night, around the fringes of activity. There was tear gas to disperse the crowds that were going around trashing things, smashing windows and whatnot. And the tear gas would drift off from where it was placed and tear gas everybody else too. So then everybody thought they were part of it too.

I think it was probably fortunate that it didn’t get worse than it did – that it didn’t get more people hurt. One of the strategies that we had used on occasion was to just pull out and let people do what they were doing. We would try to take away the focal point.

But there is a point where you just can’t do that. It wasn’t fair to the rest of the community. The police can’t just go away and let people burn down the (University Hill). I don’t know what triggered the actual confrontation, but it had been building and it was ready to go. I’m not sure any behavior could have prevented it. And I think the police were fairly restrained in waiting until things were so far out of hand that they had to do something.

Like I said, I wasn’t right up there in the middle of that melee, particularly on the first night. So I don’t know what really set it off and I think it would have gone off anyway and maybe with worse consequences if the tensions had built up higher. Maybe it was just as well to get it over with.

You had mentioned in an earlier interview that you and Sheriff Brad Leach were hired at about the same time in 1968. You had also said that the Boulder Police Department, at that time, was trying to create a new and more professional police department that was more interested in enforcing the spirit of the law than the letter of the law. Could you elaborate on that?

Of course, that’s just my perception because I don’t know what (then) Chief Vendel had in mind. But it seemed to me that the kind of people that they began hiring at the time that both Brad Leach and I started with the police department were sort of a different breed of police officer.

I don’t mean to detract from the people who were there, because there were a lot of them who were good people too and did their best job. We were a sort of rebellious young crew compared to the standard police officer that they had at the time, so it seemed like they were looking for a little bit of a shift from the kinds of people who had been hired in the past. Or, maybe our interests were shifted. Maybe different kinds of people became interested in that kind of work.

I think the new kinds of officers that got hired were, when we were talking about the flower children and the street freaks or whatever kind of terms you want to use, I think we were a little more open minded and less likely to make critical judgements about their lifestyle than some of the older police officers who were there.

So, on how to deal with some of the problems that were created, there wasn’t a unanimous opinion even within the police department at that time. As I say, we had, perhaps, a little different view than the others did.

Had you been to an officers training school in the military prior to joining the Boulder Police Department?

No. I had come here to C.U. – In fact I had an honors scholarship to C.U., but I was a terrible student and had lots of parties and lots of fun and ended up dropping out of school. So I never did finish with a degree. My major was chemistry when I started. I have subsequently gone back and taken classes in public administration and even been able to get permission to take some masters classes and get some lower level credits for them.

I had not been through officer’s training in the Army. I felt like my number was running out and that I was probably going to end up getting drafted – so I joined the Reserves so that I would have, hopefully, a six month tour of duty. That was a little bit risky for me at the time because a unit here in Boulder was an engineering battalion that constructed airfields and road – things that were in fairly high demand in Southeast Asia.

I sort of felt that it was the thing to do and that’s why I went into the unit here. I came out of that as a sergeant. I had gone into the Army back in ’64 and had gone through basic training and all that stuff. I was hired into the Boulder Sheriff’s Department in May of ’68.

There were a lot of hippies living in the mountains at that time, including the STP Gang up around Nederland. Could you describe those various camps and communes from the perspective of law enforcement?”

There was a place that I think was referred to by the people that lived there as the Buccaneer Camp. At the time, Brad Leech took office there were, I suppose, as many as two hundred people living up there in the woods in tents, old school buses and what have you. It was a real problem area. Certainly the wildlife and the flora and fauna of the area had significantly been degraded by their presence.

We were having crime problems out of there too, where people were supplying the camp with living utensils and what not by breaking into houses in the area. We even had some armed robberies of other hikers in the area – some pretty heavy-duty stuff.

We, as opposed to the previous administration, placed a high value on doing things legally and properly. Instead of just going up there and harassing people, we tried to put together good criminal cases against the people doing that kind of behavior. We were even getting search warrants for tents and trying to figure out how to describe where this was in order to follow the very intent of the laws as far as protecting constitutional rights and still get the job done. That was kind of challenging and I think we were effective at doing that. We put enough pressure on people through those proper procedures that the camp population dwindled.

I don’t think we can claim all the credit for that. Certainly the movement was dying a little bit. When we started dealing with the first waves of people who started showing up in Boulder, I referred to them as flower children because they were very idealistic and very naïve in many cases. They came here with a sort of wide-eyed wow attitude. You know, everything is beautiful and everyone is beautiful. And that was kind of a refreshing attitude. It made some people nervous because it was different than the sort of rigid society that hadn’t gone through any of these things by that point.

I felt there was sort of a percolation effect where a sort of fringe-element started to show up that were more predatory and preyed upon the flower children and their naivete’ and started exploiting them and stealing their property and forcing themselves on them in various ways. And, of course, attendant with that kind of person, we started having the crime problems. The ultimate result was that the community started crying for more strict enforcement of the rules. Between the predatory behavior of the hangers-on or the exploiters and the pressure from the Establishment, it just made it worse because the flower children moved on to greener pastures and left behind the core of sometimes disruptive and certainly antisocially oriented people.

I mentioned the STP Family as a specific group. They were named after one of the drugs of the day that was a fairly destructive kind of a drug. The closest thing I ever saw to try to relate their behavior to something was when I saw a special television program on public television about the life of a chimpanzee tribe. There were just incredible parallels between the behavior of the human beings that we were dealing with and the chimpanzees that were being portrayed on this television special.

They took whatever drugs they could get their hands on, all the way from alcohol to the hallucinogens, amphetamines, uppers, downers . . . anything they could get was a form of entertainment. I felt like some of them were sort of disconnected from reality enough that I thought that they had really damaged themselves with some of this drug abuse. So I sort of thought that they had put themselves back a few thousand years in terms of their social skills.

Did you take any courses on drugs during that time?

Not me personally. We had training classes because drugs were new to everybody then. The police department set up a narcotics unit. They had a couple of guys that were supposed to go and find everybody that was smoking pot and arrest them. But the classes we had were more oriented toward recognizing the drugs and dealing with it from a legal aspect.

I don’t think even the medical community had a real good knowledge of how to cope with the effects of it and whatnot. One thing that did happen that I thought was fairly out of character with the more rigid police administration that existed in Boulder at the time was that we were starting to have some overdose deaths from heroin and other drugs. One of the concerns was that people were not calling for help.

They were afraid they were going to be busted. So when they damn well needed an ambulance, they weren’t calling for one. So the police chief announced that if people called for help, they weren’t to be busted.

It made it obvious that the police were there for more than just arresting people and that we would try to help save their lives, too. I don’t know if that was the chief’s idea, or if that was something that the City Council imposed, but he certainly portrayed it as his own position on this.

As a result of that we had a fairly substantial exposure to the kinds of problems that drug abuse creates. The word spread very quickly and people didn’t seem to be too hesitant to call for help when they were having trouble. And the reason I say that even the medical community didn’t know how to deal with these drugs is that there weren’t really specific protocols that I could determine for dealing with certain kinds of drugs. Now they’ve discovered that certain various high dosages of vitamins and things like that can ameliorate the effects of some of the different kinds of drugs, and they have fairly specific ways of coping if they know what drug it is. They have some fairly well-thought-out procedures even when they don’t know.

In those days, we might have ended up handcuffing people to the stretchers in the ambulance so they just wouldn’t thrash themselves and hurt everybody, themselves included. We’d take them down to the emergency room and nobody would know what to do. They’d usually give them some Thorazine and things to suppress their hyperactivity, in some cases. I don’t think they had a real good treatment regimen to cope with the different kinds of drugs.

Were there vigilante groups around Ward and Nederland (mountain communities near Boulder) that were out to get these groups of hippies?

There were real social clashes and we saw that in all of the little towns in the mountains, particularly in Ward, where it turned out that the new people sort of took over and all of the older folks that were real nervous about that sort of packed up and left and sold their property and got out of town. The same thing happened in Nederland and there got to be real high levels of tension between, I guess you’d say the cowboys and freaks. And that did create problems for us. I think it was probably true in a lot of those areas up there, but Nederland and Ward were areas where it was particularly obvious.

This one woman that I interviewed said that one night in Nederland in the ‘60s there were people with torches around her house ready to burn it down. The word had gotten around that there were drug dealers coming in and out of this house, although they may have not been dealers. What was the police strategy for going after the dealers?

Well, I don’t think the police response was any more sophisticated than the medical response. People just didn’t know what to do about it. There was an effort to make undercover deals and to hopefully lead up the chain from the guy who bought it . . . who they got it from, and then on to the next level. I don’t think that was ever terribly effective.

For one thing, one of the most visible drugs was, of course, marijuana, which is still pretty prevalent around Boulder. Back then, besides being tolerated, it was almost held in some degree of reverence by the people who were using it.

They just weren’t willing to cooperate and rat people off. A lot of drug abuse was, although there were certainly people in business making money at it, at the consumer level a lot of the distribution was for free. Somebody had it and they’d give it to people and share it. They’d have a party. So they weren’t willing to cooperate with going after a thing that they just didn’t perceive as a problem at all.

I don’t think we ever developed effective strategies, and I don’t think we have to this day. We did everything just like everybody else. They sort of taught you what different pills looked like and what marijuana looked and smelled like.

I wasn’t in the Detective Bureau of the police department at the time. I think that Brad Leach was temporarily assigned in the detectives because he had made a connection with a guy who was ultimately deported. He had diplomatic immunity, so he couldn’t be charged in our court system. He ended up, subsequently . . . I think it was his uncle he murdered in Saudi Arabia and completely disrupted the political process over there. Boulder had some interesting worldwide connections.

You had mentioned that some people (you had interviewed) were trying to keep the Mafia out of Boulder. I think it was more a phenomena that there were lots of people from all over the United States who came from big cities and who were drug users and had their connections back where they came from. I felt that we fairly rapidly got up to a dozen or two dozen or more people at a fairly high level of drug dealing who were all in competition with each other and that made law enforcement a lot more difficult because there wasn’t one chain of supply that you could infiltrate.

Even if you were successful at infiltrating one fairly high-level supplier, there were anywhere from a dozen to two dozen others to take their place and fill the gap. I felt it was from the diversity of people here, and where they came from, that brought their own sources of supply in, rather than any concerted effort to keep out organized crime.

I think that success in controlling drugs is going to be limited up until the time when society refuses to tolerate it anymore and citizens begin voluntarily cooperating with the police in controlling it. In this country, under our rules, there’s no hope in hell of controlling it until that happens.

Even when the cops get pretty imaginative about looking the part and everything (to infiltrate drug organizations), which was done a little clumsily at first, you know, these guys with straight haircuts wearing grubby cloths and trying to look like hippies, they needed six or eight inch long hair. It was kind of funny to watch us stumbling around trying to enforce the drug laws. Nobody knew what was going on.

One of the things that was very discouraging to me, I guess that I learned early about how ineffective the legal system could be was . . . the STP Family had female associates as well as male associates . . . and one of the girls in the group had a very young child, a little girl who was not even two years old. They would get drugs and shoot themselves up with speed and stuff, and they’d shoot this little kid up with speed. And, of course, she’d just kind of go crazy and really act out, hyperactive and everything, and they’d think that it was great entertainment.

We went ahead and were able to bring legal proceedings and try to get this child removed from the mother’s legal custody. They’d let her run around in the street up there at 13^th and College, and give her drugs and stuff and we just thought that that was outrageous. We’d go testify before the judge about what kinds of lack of reasonable behavior this woman had toward her child and found out that it was an almost impossible burden of proof. At least in those days, it almost didn’t matter what somebody was doing to their kid. If they were the mother, they got to keep the kid. We went back to court two different times after taking the girl into protective custody and arresting the mother and they ended up giving the kid back both times. It was really discouraging! I don’t know if she even survived. She’d be in her twenties now. (1985)

In what ways have things changed as far as how the police handled things back then and how they handle things now?

The city did studies from time to time about public attitudes. They’d do random surveys about things. The police department always got real high marks. I don’t know if you took a survey today if it would be quite at that high level or not.

After being very stable for a number of years, the police department went through a number of police Chiefs for awhile. The present Chief seems to have things back fairly stable again, but in between there was some strife and turmoil and the union got very strong. In terms of police service, once a union starts fighting management, a lot of energy goes into internal disputes, rather than service. I don’t know who’s fault that is. Certainly the Chief who was very stable tried to impose some very strict personal values on the whole department and ended up creating an environment where people felt that they wanted to preserve their own lifestyles and were having to hire lawyers to keep their jobs. He did some good things and some progressive things and also created what grew into an unhealthy environment later on and caused a lot of strife and turmoil.

I think Boulder, still, with the chief that’s there presently, is still fairly progressive. Unfortunately, as we become larger and become more part of a metropolitan area, we have more of the hard-core types of crime that big cities have. One of the things that I hope hasn’t happened yet is that, in big cities, often crime is terribly under-reported. I think in a smaller community where the community has a high level of confidence in their police, whether it’s the police department or the Sheriff, I think they’re much more likely to report being victims of things. Once people stop reporting, they’re almost giving the bad guys a license to do whatever it is they’re doing. Even though we solve only a minority of the crime that’s reported to us, we do solve enough of it to have an influence over the long-haul. Of course, if a crime isn’t ever reported, we don’t stand a chance. Then it really goes downhill. So it’s important that the community keep up its level of involvement.

We’ve had a lot of examples where the community has been willing to get involved. Quite some time ago, a guy shot the Deputy-Marshall up in Nederland and was actually apprehended by angry citizens. That’s a rather radical example, but we’ve had lots of cases of people going out of their way to get involved and help us with stuff, rather than going out of their way to disappear, like you hear horror stories about in other parts of the country.

A consequence of that is that we are, comparatively, taking a little more of a beating in terms of the crime rate because the reporting percentage is higher. Just comparing the numbers isn’t really accurate. We need to keep things under control.

Boulder has expanded dramatically without adding much to their police resources. I think there’s a point of saturation, and I see that happening to them sometimes. Our problem, in the county, is that we have such tremendous distances to travel delivering the kind of service we’d like to , for different reasons than the city has. They’ve probably reached the point that if they aren’t willing to put a little bit more into the police resource, I don’t see how we can keep up. They’ve done all kinds of alternatives, like handling things by telephone, but their really pushing us into a corner doing it. I don’t think they can achieve the level of service back when Brad and I started working.

When did you start working for the Sheriff?

I went to work for Brad when he was elected back in ’71. He was elected in ’70 and took office in ’71.

Are people’s attitudes toward drugs different today than they were in the ‘60s?

I think so. There are a lot of shifts, because in the ‘50s we all sort of did what our parents told us (to do) automatically, up until the point where we sort of rebelled. Then we’d get out of that and grow up eventually. In the ‘60s, everybody sort of questioned the values of adults and didn’t accept any of them. Today, and even in the ‘70s, I felt like kids were better informed and tended to make their own choices with better information. During the ‘60s, you couldn’t convince anybody that drugs could be bad for you. (Drugs) were considered just the best thing that came along.

Even five years ago it was really difficult to convince people that there was any danger to cocaine. Arthur Conan Doyle experimented with it, and certainly you had Sherlock Holmes doing it. All of the same kinds of fallacies and distorted information were coming out that time that happened with all of the drugs which came along. You just can’t stick chemicals in your body without having some kind of consequence to that. People were denying that until recently. People may still choose to use drugs, but (if they do) they’re ignoring the facts. I don’t think they can say they’ve never heard of the problems. The naivete’ is pretty well gone.

Although I think that drug abuse is still as prevalent as it was, it is a little bit more suppressed. I think society could be at a point where they’re ready to say, “Enough it enough.” Certainly, with some of the major sports figures getting involved and killing themselves with drugs probably has raised the consciousness for another whole group of people who look up to those people as heroes. So there are social shifts that take place.

Did you have to do much protecting of the flower children from those predatory kinds of people?

We did to some extent. It was kind of like dealing with little children sometimes. I remember this one caravan came into town . . . I can’t remember the group. They had probably seventy or eighty school buses full of people. They were out on a ranch in East Boulder. Rumors spread that the rednecks were coming and those people loaded up in their buses and came racing to the middle of town. We even had officers staying out there with them all night long. I don’t think there were any rednecks coming, but they certainly did!

There had been problems, and, in fact, fairly recently some of the high school kids who have gotten more conservative in their values, or at least there’s a broad spectrum now. Not all the high school kids are liberals or all conservatives. There’s kind of a mix.

But some of the redneck high school students have taken it upon themselves to go out and beat people up that aren’t conforming to what they think are reasonable values. And that has happened even fairly recently, as I say. There were problems with that back in the ‘60s, giving people an excuse to be unreasonable.