If you take the boulder officer who said that, and have him work a month detail in Denver, his statement would be different at the end of the month. If you took an officer from Denver, and had him work Boulder for a month he would tell you the football players are good guys. The players are just college kids. They are part of a large identifiable group, which allows them to be singled out much easier as well. If you want to look at a comparison to the total student body, in the last 9 months players have gotten in trouble for the following: one busted for smoking pot, one kid busted for stealing a text book/sort of (as he did leave his bag behind), one kid busted for DUI and missed his court date (who is no longer on the team), and one kid steal a bike. That is four of 115 football players, or just under 4%. I don’t think I would be going out on a limb by saying that 4% of all students at CU have had this type of trouble with the law in the last 9 months. If you took into account all MIP’s, theft, accademic cheating, DUI’s, assault/fights, vandalizations, and other crimes that will take place over that time frame, I would say the football players are just normal college kids that have a higher profile when they get caught. The other thing that magnifies the crime is the fact they are in Boulder and not Baltimore. A walk-on football player stealing a bike wouldn’t make the footnotes of the crime for the day in a big city.
As a youth I spent a lot of time in Greenwood Village, and I assure you every GV cop would have told you the world is going to burn because the kids today are all hoodlums. We would loiter, TP, and occasionally egg a house or car, and the police officers would treat these events like they were the gateway actions to major felonies. When a cop doesn’t have to deal with major crime on a regular basis, their view of what constitutes “thugs” is different from what an actual thug is.