HATE CRIMES (PART DUEX)

Boulder Catches A Racist

By Amy Brouillette, 7-06-05

Thanks to local tipsters, Boulder Police this week arrested a suspect linked to last month’s brutal hate crime—and without even having to leave their own back yard. The 38-year-old suspect, Phillip Bernard Martinez of Lafayette, was already locked up in Boulder County jail on unrelated drug charges when police issued his arrest warrant Tuesday.

Boulder police pulled the case together after receiving a handful of tips from locals, along with some help from area law enforcement and the FBI—to whom local investigators gave their props in a press release yesterday. According to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation records pulled by the Daily Camera, Martinez has a 13-page rap sheet that includes sexual assault, kidnapping and cruelty to a child (apparently he’s an equal-opportunity hater), and more than 15 assault charges since 1988. Martinez is now charged with ethnic intimidation and assault, a class 5 felony under Colorado state law, in the racially-motivated attack of a 22-year-old student near 11th and Arapaho on June 3.

This crime, along with a handful of other, though less physically violent racist crimes reported this spring, has sparked rounds of local media attention, rattled local peaceniks and ripped a gaping hole in Boulder’s pc image. The city, at last, is stepping up. It formed a new Human Relations Committee (HRC), aimed at educating about diversity and enforcing Boulder’s Human Rights Ordinance, a local anti-discrimination law already on the books. The group today held its first public meeting to discuss ways to prevent and deal with future racist crimes in Boulder.

It's a big job. Stamping out hate is indeed a battle of hearts and minds—even with strict local, state and federal hate-crime laws in place, racism still plagues us. Still, the city’s revived commitment toward a hate-free city—just the acknowledgment alone that racism as much a Boulder problem as it is anywhere else—is a necessary step in the right direction.

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