Be prepared, the experts tell us. The violent protests of summer 2020 alongside pervasive homelessness could be nearing their end. Or, they could be festering like a virus for another outbreak greater than the last and ready to affect populations outside large cities such as Portland, New York, Minneapolis, and Denver.
We’ve already seen episodes of left-wing violence in small towns and suburbs. Consider remote Alamosa in the middle of the vast San Luis Valley, nearly three hours from Colorado Springs and four hours from Denver. Alamosa is rural, friendly, and enviously uneventful. Yet this summer, Alamosa became the scene of a Black Lives Matter protest so violent it put one man in a coma for weeks and left him with permanent brain damage.
As at most Black Lives Matter protests throughout the country, the protesters were mostly white. Alamosa Mayor Ty Coleman is black, but Census data shows 97.4% of Alamosa is not black. Whites, many of Latino heritage, are the community’s largest demographic.
A ragtag band branches out
“We’re seeing what began as violent protests in the central areas of large cities drifting into other areas,” said state Sen. Ray Scott, a Republican from Grand Junction. “We’re seeing it drift into the suburbs and small towns. It could continue and get worse.”
Most rational people are sympathetic to the cause implied by the name of Black Lives Matter, a Marxist organization with founders and leaders known to boast of their communist loyalties. A Marquette University Law School poll in mid-June showed 61% support for the BLM movement. A month later, in mid-August, that support had slipped to 48% as riots had become more violent and widespread.
“This drifting into residential neighborhoods, suburbs, and towns is a game changer,” Scott explains. “A protest in the downtown area of a large city is something most people see on TV, as they destroy a government building or a J.C. Penney. But now, you’re starting to mess with homes and families and kids, and Momma Bear is going to protect her nest any way possible.”
Longtime Colorado Democratic strategist and attorney Ted Trimpa, the architect of the Colorado “Blueprint” credited and blamed for making Colorado a reliably Democratic state, said he fears more violence could play out in suburbs and small towns. He rejects the assertion that Democrats have tacitly approved of violent riots, even though Democrats control statewide elective offices (aside from one U.S. Senate seat) as well as the government of Denver and the state House and Senate.
“It’s going to get worse,” Trimpa said, right after visiting New York in late September.
In New York, Trimpa saw T-shirts selling like cheap hotcakes. They began with an expletive that rhymes with “duck” — stating, “Duck” everyone, though “D” was a different letter.
“The shirts have artwork with two guys beating each other up, with the Left and Right represented by fists,” Trimpa said. “So there’s the climate for a much bigger fire, and it is worrisome.”
‘Bad actors’ hijack a good cause
Summer protests ignited after the world saw mobile-phone footage of Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, kneeling on the neck of black suspect George Floyd for nearly nine minutes. Floyd did not survive, and most people associate his death with the knee on the neck, assuming a racial motive on the part of Chauvin and three other officers who stood by doing nothing to help Floyd as he begged for his life.
But critics and observers believe the violent element among protesters never really cared about Floyd or racial justice. Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman’s city, an eastern suburb of Denver and the country’s 54th most populous city, endured multiple violent protests during the summer. On at least one occasion, protesters blocked high-speed freeway lanes of Interstate Highway 225.
“It’s been tough all over the country, but we’ve certainly experienced our fair share of violence here in Aurora,” Coffman said.
He and his city’s police department witnessed mostly white, affluent young protesters converging on Aurora throughout the summer to cause damage in a city that is 16% black, with a diverse demographic of minorities that make up about 40% of the population. He believes almost none of the protesters reside in Aurora.
Activist Samuel Alvin Young, a white 23-year-old from the suburb of Wheat Ridge, fired a gun during the Aurora highway protest. He struck two people trying to pass through in a Jeep and stands charged with four counts of attempted first-degree murder.
Coffman said protests in his town began with peaceful and legally protected assemblies. Most were there to mourn the tragic death of Elijah McClain in August 2019 after an arrest by Aurora police. McClain, 23, was black, unarmed, and wearing a ski mask while dance-walking to music on his way home from work. Someone called 911 to report a “suspicious” person.
When police tried to question McClain, he continued walking and said he had done nothing wrong. After the interaction became a struggle, a paramedic on the scene injected McClain with ketamine to subdue him. McClain suffered a heart attack on the way to the hospital and later died on life support.
“Obviously, the legitimate protesters who assembled because of the tragic death of Elijah McClain have a First Amendment right, and I respect that,” Coffman said. “But there is an element that comes in underneath those protesters that has no cause other than they are excited by violence. They are very well organized and equipped and armed.”
Denver’s third-term Mayor Michael Hancock, whose downtown has borne the brunt of the violence and unrest in the state, draws a bright line between a peaceful movement and the political fringe. And the fringe, he says, knows no home turf.
“Radical right and left, agitation and anger are a sign of our times and not unique to Denver,” Hancock said.
“Most protesters, whether on the Right or Left of the political spectrum, have been responsible, but there are bad actors with bad intentions who can easily turn what former congressman John Lewis called ‘good trouble’ into ‘bad trouble.’”
A neighborhood invaded
Left-wing protesters occupied the streets of the middle-class Pulpit Rock neighborhood in Colorado Springs on Aug. 3, armed with AR-15s and other military-style rifles and a shotgun. White protester Sherrie Smith, of the Colorado Springs suburb of Fountain, is seen on video in a ready-fire stance with her military rifle aimed at the pickup truck of a man other protesters detained as he tried to drive home. She and two other activists were subsequently arrested and charged with felony rioting and other charges related to menacing with guns.
“They were right in front of our home, and I feared gun violence at any moment,” said a mother of two young children in the Pulpit Rock neighborhood. “The kids and a few friends were playing outside, and suddenly, I see people in ninja suits and ski masks holding what looked like weapons of war. They were within a few feet of our yard. I got the kids inside, and we spent the next few hours in the basement, worried about bullets coming through the walls.”
Police likewise feared bullets would fly and remained in a command vehicle throughout the hourslong riot to avoid igniting a gunfight. Most of the media declined to report on the heavy arms carried by the protesters, or even to call it a “riot,” focusing instead on one mature resident who stood in his yard with a rifle to protect his home and family.
“I was somewhat critical of the incident commander for not arresting the people blocking traffic,” said Colorado Springs Mayor and former Colorado Attorney General John Suthers. “But those are tough calls when you’re on the scene. That incident commander would have been on the line if police confronted the protesters and violence broke out endangering the neighborhood.”
Earlier in the summer, Suthers kept a watch on protesters demonstrating in front of City Hall. He said when they did not attract the level of media attention they desired, the protesters made an impromptu decision to march west to I-25 and block the freeway. That got the full attention of the media and the public.
“In a split second, they changed their tactics, and it’s pretty hard to be prepared for that — to know where they’re going to go and respond in time to prevent it,” Suthers said.
Coffman had a similar incident in which protesters changed tactics without a moment’s notice, leaving law enforcement behind the curve.
“The incident started back where Elijah McClain had the incident with the Aurora Police Department,” Coffman said. “Then, what happened is they started a march. We thought they were going to march to City Hall, but then, they turned and went over to the District 1 [police] headquarters. That surprised us, and we weren’t ready for it.”
Suthers and Coffman say their police departments and other public safety agencies have been preparing for the possibility of escalating violence that could break out at any time in any neighborhood. They use intelligence gathering tactics, which they won’t talk about in detail, to try getting a step ahead of violent protests.
“Some cities have tried to ban protests in residential neighborhoods, but it didn’t fly,” Suthers said, explaining he researched legal options for the city after the Pulpit Rock riot. “The courts say you cannot prohibit it.”
That’s because the right to assemble peaceably is an ironclad guarantee of the First Amendment, right up until peaceful assembly becomes violent. And therein lies the Catch-22. Like Coffman in Aurora, city officials in Denver, Colorado Springs, and other cities report the protests almost always begin peacefully and become violent when a small number of criminals take advantage of the anti-establishment sentiment of well-meaning demonstrators.
Downtown Denver besieged
The summer of off-and-on violence in Denver led to boarded-up buildings downtown and profane, anti-police graffiti all over the State Capitol building. U.S. Military Academy graduate, veteran, and business executive Mike Lynch, a resident of Wellington in northern Colorado, heard about it and visited Denver with a small video camera. He could not believe what he saw. He believes most Colorado residents have no idea much of downtown Denver looks like a war zone, complete with refugees on sidewalks.
“I think it was two months to the day a riot had led to all of this graffiti, and nothing had been done to clean it up,” Lynch said. “You would have expected state leadership, starting with the Democratic governor, to take care of this in the first 24 to 48 hours when the paint would come off easier. Nothing had been done two months later. Every single window of the Capitol building, which belongs to the people, was boarded up.”
Lynch had heard about the graffiti but did not know about homeless people living in tents throughout multiple residential and commercial neighborhoods.
A candidate for House District 49, Lynch recorded footage. He created a short documentary called It’s Time!! Bring My State Back that went viral. He showed footage of a line of homeless tents crammed together along a sidewalk and less than 10 feet from a middle school playground.
“How safe would you feel with your child going to that school?” Lynch asks on video.
Lynch told the Gazette he expects the violence to continue and spread as the country becomes increasingly divided over a Supreme Court vacancy, a rush by Republicans to fill it, a viral pandemic, and an upcoming election to determine who controls the Senate and the White House. It could be a perfect storm.
“It could get a lot worse, I fear,” Lynch said.
Denver’s Mayor Hancock counters that things could have been a lot worse and, in fact, turned out much better than in similar-sized cities paralyzed by street violence elsewhere in the country.
“We have been clear from the start that violence and vandalism are not acceptable ways to exercise peaceful protest in Denver,” Hancock said.
“For the most part, Denver has not seen the level of violence or property destruction that many other cities have experienced,” he said, “and that is a testament to our residents and public safety professionals, as well as public awareness that Denver has been a leader in police reform and well ahead of other cities in terms of innovative community policing.”
Suzanne Staiert commuted downtown regularly from her Arapahoe County home while serving as Colorado’s deputy secretary of state from 2012 to 2018. Now that the one-time Littleton city attorney is running for a state Senate seat on her home turf (suburbs Littleton and Centennial), she is hearing from voters who are apprehensive as never before about entering Denver’s downtown.
“There are people who live here and work downtown and don’t feel safe going there,” Staiert said, noting that after the COVID-19 shutdown emptied downtown, the unrest never let it recover.
“People are just shocked at how much it could have changed in less than a year,” she said. “Boarded windows, barricades, graffiti, and homeless camps have battered the area’s image.”
“It’s the vandalism and the sense that police don’t feel free to enforce the law,” she said. “It doesn’t seem safe, and it doesn’t seem like the kind of place they want to be commuting every day.”
Cops become a casualty
The outrageous actions of a Minneapolis police officer set off a wildfire that swept the nation. By the time it roared through Colorado, officers had become the target. Not only of overt street violence but also of radical policy proposals.
A call to “defund the police” caught on across the country. In Colorado, a Denver City Council member and self-described anarchist proposed replacing the city’s police force with a “peace force” — an idea rejected last month by the rest of the council.
But a related notion took hold at the city’s school district (Colorado’s largest) when the Denver Public Schools board voted in June to boot out 17 Denver police who had been serving in district schools as student resource officers. They had been stationed at the schools not only to boost security but also to foster better relations between law enforcement and Denver’s diverse neighborhoods.
Their departure has had a ripple effect in metro Denver’s suburbs, where police enjoy broad community support, Staiert said.
Voters she talks to “are afraid this anti-officer movement could impact the relationship that the police have with our schools,” she said. “A lot of people here aren’t interested in going that way.”
In Arapahoe County’s Cherry Creek and Littleton school districts, she said, “a lot of kids feel a little safer when they walk through the door and a school resource officer is there.”
Home is where they pitch a tent
After viewing Lynch’s video of a chaotic downtown Denver, Gazette editorial board members visited a homeless encampment smack in the middle of downtown Denver and found an astonishing number of people living outside by choice. They like the sense of community. No amount of free housing or shelter, several told us, would change their lifestyle. They don’t want conventional housing.
“I have an apartment,” said a homeless woman who goes by the street name “Pretty.” She said the apartment is lonely, whereas homeless encampments are social, friendly, fun, and free of the burden of rent or mortgage payments.
“It’s about the unity that you get amongst all of the homeless,” said Pretty, who rejects the term “homeless” and calls herself “residentially challenged.” “They [the residentially challenged] are a very tight community, although the stealing has got to stop, guys.”
She and others told us life on the street makes them part of something, and riots have added to a sense of belonging. Others are not there by choice, including the young brother and sister, who told us they are helplessly addicted to heroin and have no money for conventional housing.
The economics of “haves” and “have nots” have Democrat Trimpa worried about the imminent future. It could be one of increasing homelessness and mayhem in neighborhoods of all characteristics, in small towns, villages, suburbs, and wealthy neighborhoods in all of the above.
“God, I hope not,” Trimpa says. “But with the coronavirus and all the other tensions in society, we could see a situation in which the white-collar economy returns faster than the working-class, low-wage, blue-collar economy. If people get fired up even more about an unfair economy, on top of everything else, this could get a lot worse.”
On that possibility, he and Republican Suthers agree.
“We are preparing for that,” Suthers said.
Wayne Laugesen is editor of the editorial pages of the Gazette, the Washington Examiner’s sister publication in Colorado Springs. This piece was originally published there.
