TELLURIDE — Bill Masters prefers to deflect the glare of a spotlight.
But the longest-serving lawman in Colorado history, who recently stepped down from a nearly 50-year career in San Miguel County, has some stories to tell and perspectives on policing he wants to share.
A new documentary by Telluride filmmaker David Holbrooke is giving Masters a venue to share.
“This is a true crime story with big ideas,” Holbrooke said last month as he debuted clips of “Peace Officer” at his Original Thinkers festival, which he created to explore “the intersection of our ideas and our stories.”
Masters bristles at the term “law enforcement.” This fall he spoke to a graduating class of police cadets at the Western Colorado Law Enforcement Academy and urged them to shirk the notion of force and replace it with a more community-focused approach of “peacekeeping.”
“Somewhere along the line we got away from being peace officers,” he said at his first-ever viewing of clips from the documentary with Holbrooke in Telluride. “I think we are starting off on the wrong foot by calling ourselves officers who use force as opposed to peace officers.”
Part of that peacekeeping focus pushed Masters to refuse requests for help from federal immigration officials in recent crackdowns on immigrants.
“Certainly federalizing our local peacekeepers is an incredibly poor tactic,” said Masters, pointing to northern U.S. sheriffs rebelling against the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act that demanded they return runaway slaves to plantations in the South. “It was wrong. It was against their morals. I think there is a certain parallel to that to this day.”
The documentary also explores Masters’ experience with the August 1987 Grateful Dead concerts in the dead-end canyon. The memorable performances overwhelmed Telluride. They also pushed the sheriff to more closely examine the country’s bumbling War on Drugs.
Masters was still a “drug warrior” back then, he said, but he was starting to question the drug war. He had an undercover deputy go out and buy LSD.
“We are still a town and we have children and we have people who live here. You shouldn’t have people screaming out ‘acid, acid!’ on the sidewalk,” he said.
He arrested 26 people. He had to rent a bus to haul them out of town to a bigger jail in Montrose.
“They sang Grateful Dead songs all the way,” he said.
None of the concertgoers were charged. The futility of the arrests made him realize “how ridiculous the whole situation was,” he said. “Why there wasn’t a rebellion over the drug war always surprised me.”
Today, Masters remains a vocal critic of the deluge of laws that have pushed peacekeepers away from their communities. There are 400 traffic violations in Colorado. There are more than 30,000 laws that police enforce in the state. Many of those laws have oversized impacts on the poor and people of color compared to the white and wealthy.
The glut of regulations targeting specific people “debase all laws” making all rules grow “more and more meaningless,” he said.
“Why aren’t we in a constant state of rebellion about all these different laws?” he said. “Maybe if we took the time to look at all our laws and look at the ones who are injured by our laws, there will be less resistance to the peace officer and therefore less need for the tasers and handcuffs and firearms and all that stuff.”