Zen and the art of law enforcement
http://www.aspendailynews.com/section/home/144623
by Andrew Travers
January 9, 2011
In the waning hours of his near quarter century as Aspen's top
lawman, Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis isn't shedding any public
tears, he's not waxing nostalgic about his six terms in office, and
not settling any scores. As he prepares to turn over the department
he's run since 1987 to his protégé Joe DiSalvo on Tuesday, the
sheriff is a man at ease.
"The reality is I made the decision [not to run for re-election] last
March and I've been doing a farewell tour since then," Braudis said.
"Tuesday is just a symbolic un-tethering, when I can drift wherever
the currents of life push me. And that's what I'm going to do."
He did agonize over the choice last year, he explained, but settled
on retirement swayed by a combination of not wanting to continue
working into his 70s, and his rock-ribbed confidence in DiSalvo and
his deputies to keep the department on the right track.
Braudis is proud of the work the sheriff's office has done during his
tenure: Maintaining local trust in county cops, building a humane and
rehabilitation-based jail, and brokering an untold number of deals
for troubled locals without the use of courtrooms or handcuffs. But,
he said, he's content to move on.
"I think I'm naturally Zen," he explained Friday afternoon in his
basement office at the Pitkin County Courthouse, surrounded by
half-empty boxes, papers and the detritus of 24 years of public
service in that 15-by-15-foot stone-walled hovel. "I live in the
present. There's nothing better I mean, you can't live in the past,
and the future is a promissory note. You don't know what the future
is so if you can master living in the present and enjoy it, you've
won the game of life ... Here's the way my life is: As the carpet
unrolls through the forest of life, I follow it. And it's a blazing
red carpet."
There will be no official county farewell party for Braudis, because
he doesn't want one. But the charismatic and consistently popular
sheriff seems to be in a perpetual state of celebration these days.
Sheriff-elect DiSalvo expressed some astonishment at Braudis not
growing at least a little maudlin over leaving his office.
"A lot of people after 24 years of coming to the same place, this
same desk a place becomes home, it becomes a part of you," he said.
"But I honestly don't think he has a shred of problems with not being
here after Tuesday."
As he discussed his last days as sheriff, Braudis cued up Paul
Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble" on his laptop and flashed his
signature gap-toothed smile. He matter-of-factly dropped quotes by
Lord Acton and Dostoyevsky in conversation alongside quips such as,
"I've got my finger on the G-spot of this community. I know the
pulse. I know what's going on."
He joked about the late-night shenanigans of his younger days in
Aspen, pivoting his 6' 5" foot frame casually on a swivel chair,
letting a grey shock of hair fall over his eyes as he shook his head
at the end of sentence, seemingly to accentuate his goofiness. But in
a flash, his face fell into a stony seriousness whenever he talked
about his "core beliefs" in human rights, compassionate law
enforcement and preserving Aspen's peaceful spirit.
"We're about taking the fear out of government," he said of his legal
philosophy. "Government should not be feared. Cops should not be
feared. And if I've got a cop who makes people afraid, then I messed
up when I hired him."
Braudis prides himself on having run a department free of arrest
quotas or bullet-head machismo or any of the institutional sadism
that is the norm in many of America's law enforcement agencies.
"Any cop can ruin your day just because he wants to," he said. "But
we don't tolerate that here."
Instead, the sheriff and his department became a trusted resource for
locals to quell problems, legal and otherwise. As sheriff, Braudis
didn't patrol the streets, direct traffic, rescue stranded hikers or
make arrests like his deputies did.
Braudis, with an open-door policy for the community, served often as
a sort of mediator.
"There was a steady stream of problems coming through the door and
they were leaving with solutions," he said. "Extra-legal [solutions]
to avoid court, avoid jail, avoid beating the shit out of someone
avoid getting the shit beat out of you. Basic street-corner human
problem-solving."
The sheriff's policies and practices on illicit drugs, in Braudis'
view, have been unnecessarily hyped. He has long preached legalizing
marijuana and other drugs, while championing treatment for addiction
rather than legal penalties for possession; he has not conducted
undercover investigations because he says they erode public trust of
his department; and he has drawn public criticism from officials with
the DEA, who say he impedes their ability to operate in Pitkin County.
"I'm no one trick pony," he said of the wide attention given to his
drug views. "I never wanted to be a crusader for or against drugs in
'the war.' But I am a crusader for your human rights: Life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness. If you don't hurt anyone else, be as
happy as you can be."
During his tenure, the sheriff has sparked curiosity from the
national and international press for his hands-off approach,
blunt-spoken manner, advocacy for decriminalizing drugs and his
friendship with the late writer Hunter S. Thompson.
In 2008 he co-authored "The Kitchen Readings," a fond and irreverent
book-long remembrance of Thompson, with Woody Creek's Michael
Cleverly. In retirement he hopes to complete another book, which he's
already begun drafting in spurts. He described it as a memoir of his
life "that would mesh with war stories" of his six terms as sheriff.
"I've got a book in my head," he said. "I don't know who wants to
read it but I'm going to write it. Any book I write will have an
essential component, which is psychologically revealing. Basically, I
want my kids to understand me. They say they understand me, but they
don't ... That's the hardest writing, to write about yourself and why
you are the way you are."
His two daughters were a primary reason Braudis fell into law
enforcement. After divorcing his first wife, he got custody of the
girls Heidi and Stephanie and moved them to Aspen from the East
Coast in 1969.
He juggled the life of single dad and ski bum for several years,
until he decided he needed a real job.
"I came here to ski and that's what I did everyday," he said. "I
didn't do shit for five or six years. I pissed away my savings, I
bent nails, I helped cook in restaurants and I really brought
perfection to the art of being a ski bum ... I became a cop in '76
because I needed a job."
Braudis served as a sheriff's deputy under Dick Kienast, the hip and
intellectual lawman nicknamed "Dick Dove" who would become Braudis'
mentor and lay the foundation for Aspen's progressive brand of
community policing. Both men had been foot soldiers in Hunter
Thompson's 1970 "Freak Power" campaign for sheriff, and Braudis
credits his move from hedonism to civic engagement to the examples of
Thompson and the original slow-growth Pitkin County commissioners
Michael Kinsley and Joe Edwards.
Through them, he said, he learned how local government can
meaningfully protect quality of life.
"In the early '70s there was a bulldozer warming up on every 100-acre
plot, where you could build a 100 houses with one-acre plots,"
Braudis said. "Say good-bye to the pastures. It would have happened,
but these guys stood up. And at great personal cost to them."
Braudis took a seat as a Pitkin County commissioner himself in 1984.
Asked on Friday about his brief stint on the county board, he feigned a yawn.
In 1986, Kienast asked him to run for the sheriff's seat, which he
won and has held since.
"What I inherited," Braudis said, "was a great foundation that was
laid by all of us, Dick Dove and the Deputies of Love. A big change
from the redneck gunslingers that came before us. So Kienast was the
pioneer, I was the second guy down the trail, Joey [DiSalvo] is the
third guy down this trail, and it's been well-blazed. But you're
always improving it."
So Braudis isn't all that emotional about laying down his badge and
hanging up his proverbial spurs. Truth be told, he never wore either
and said he never put on his sheriff's uniform in the last 24 years.
"I wore my own uniform: cotton," he laughed, tapping his loose slacks
and open-collared shirt.
Along with writing, he plans to travel the world in the coming years
with his partner, DeDe Brinkman. But as long as she and his friends
are in Aspen, it will remain home.
He hasn't skied for two years, and said he isn't going to pick it
back up in retirement, due to bum knees. Ironically, the powder days
and sporting life that brought Braudis here four-plus decades ago
aren't even a factor in keeping him here for his post-retirement life.
"Take the mountains away tomorrow but my friends are here, I'm here,"
he said of why he plans to stay. "Take my friends away, and I'd lose
interest in the granite of the Rocky Mountains real quick."
And, at 66, the sheriff is older than his father and grandfather were
when they died. As he put it, "My genes suck ... I'll real be honest.
I don't want to get old. But I'm going to have to learn to like it, I
know that. In my head I'm still, like, 22 there's still a lot I
want to do and I'm going to do a lot of it. But I'm not going to be
one of these guys that has their hair colored, a fake tan, and works
out six hours a day and still looks like an old dude with big pecs. I
don't want to be one of those. I want to be the aging intellectual
that's my self-image for the future. 'Who's that?' 'Oh, that's an
aging intellectual. I think he was a history major.' I was. And now
I'm history."
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