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Aspen’s night patrol police don’t face the challenges of bigger American cities. There is no red light Officer Joe Holman

district, no gangs, no street corner crack-slingers — in high season they mostly manage a mélange of well-heeled tourists and après-skiers who may be up to drunken mischief. A chief challenge for the police, in fact, is staving off the long stretches of boredom between rare moments of crisis.

“I cruise the alleys,” Officer Joe Holman explains, at the wheel of his Volvo XC90 squad car with KCUF radio playing a John Mayer song in the background. “Because, generally, if people are back here they’re either smoking dope or pissing.”

The downtown alleys of Aspen are empty this Friday night. But the streets are teeming with the revelers of Aspen’s high season, bar-hopping and strolling icy, snow-packed sidewalks.

“I drive with a window down most of the time, too,” Holman explains, “so I can monitor the hum of the streets. You can usually tell when there’s a fight or an argument worth checking out.”

The inside of Holman’s patroller is outfitted with a police radio, a radar, a camera that films all traffic stops and a decibel meter.

“Is she all right?” he hollers through the passenger side window, at a group of wobbly young 20-somethings standing over a girl who had fallen on a patch of ice at Galena and Cooper streets.

The girl sits up, giggling and waving.

“Oh yeah, she’s cool,” says a man helping her up.

For a while, Holman parks outside of the Amen Wardy homeware shop, where he can monitor crowds on the Hyman Avenue mall outside of Club Chelsea and New York Pizza, where he says fights sometimes break out.

Holman cruises down Main Street. For a few blocks, he follows a driver who ran a yellow traffic light. Then he drives to the city vehicles gas station to fill his tank.

“Tonight’s a pretty quiet night,” Holman says while gassing up at the Spartan two pump station below Castle Creek Bridge on Power Plant Road.

Back in the car a few minutes later, with the time nearing 1 a.m., Holman’s police radio crackles: “122, you have a call for a recent assault at Belly Up.”

“Of course you do,” Holman says, picking up speed but keeping his siren silent.

THE COMMAND CENTER
The call had come from Audra Keith, sitting at one of two desks at the APD’s dispatch room, which sits behind the police station.

All 911 calls in Pitkin County are fielded here. The police, fire and ambulance crews in Aspen, Snowmass and Basalt are all directed from here, along with sheriff’s deputies who patrol the county and the street department team, who tackle problems with county roads.

Friday night, Dawn Webber is fielding all of those calls. Webber has been dubbed “Queen of the Night” by her colleagues because of her penchant for the graveyard shift, which keeps her there until 7 a.m.

“I was a bartender in town for years,” Webber says. “This is always when I’ve worked.”

Webber collects information from callers, and punches it into a computer that transmits it across the room to Keith, who calls it out over the radio to coordinate responses.

Along with serious calls like the reported fight at Belly Up and a house fire that had come through a few hours earlier, the dispatch team fields a number of calls that sound like fodder for a snowy version of Comedy Central’s “Cops” farce, “Reno 911!”

Earlier in the night, they had fielded a call from a woman, naked and high, who didn’t know who or where she was.

A tourist recently called 911 from an Aspen hotel room, to report he had no clean towels.

Another called asking for a snowplow to help him drive over Independence Pass.

This summer a New York man who wasn’t aware of mountain wildlife’s Aspen inhabitancy, called in a panic to say, “I think a bear has escaped from the zoo! It’s out in the street!”

ON THE SCENE
When the call came over the radio for the Belly Up incident, Officer Terry Leitch was on a foot patrol downtown. As Officer Holman arrives, Leitch is already on the scene.

“I was down the block doing a bar check,” he explains. The “bar check” is a nightly routine for Aspen police, who walk the downtown core — usually in groups of two or three — making rounds in uniform through crowded barrooms.

“When people see cops coming through bars it tends to keep them in line,” Holman says of the practice.

Approaching the Belly Up, Holman sees a blonde woman on her hands and knees on the sidewalk. Another woman attempts to help her up, but both fall back down.

“You guys all right?” Holman asks the pair.

They both turn with a snort of laughter and a wave.

“I don’t think this is what we got called over for,” he says.

The call, it turned out, was for a reported fight between drunk girlfriends in the club’s bathroom.

Officer Mike Tracey, who had been on foot patrol with Terry Leitch, walks into the basement bar and high-fives Belly Up sound technician Ralph Pitt, who is sporting an “Aspen Police” zip-up sweatshirt.

Outside, Holman and Leitch are interviewing the women who had been in the alleged bathroom fight. Apparently, both had now decided they didn’t want police involved. But, because they were lovers in a domestic relationship, the officers couldn’t let them go.

“Domestic cases are really the most difficult,” explained Officer Tracey, as crowds filed out of the club, where a Reverend Horton Heat rockabilly show was ending. “In most cases we can use our discretion as to whether we make an arrest or not. In domestics, by state law, we have to arrest if we have probable cause.”

The officers arrested both women and charged each with third-degree assault and domestic violence.

A QUIET DAWN APPROACHES
The women are hand-cuffed, patted down, placed in separate squad cars and driven to the Pitkin County Jail.

Unlike most towns, arrestees riding to jail in Aspen aren’t tossed in backseats behind bulletproof glass partitions. Instead, they ride in the shotgun seat, beside the arresting officer. It makes this short ride in a Volvo SUV more like a sullen after-school trip to soccer practice than a criminal transport.

At the jail, the women are placed in separate “iso cells,” with cloth blinds pulled over Plexiglass windows so they cannot see each other.

Writing summonses for them at the jail’s booking desk, with the time nearing 2 a.m., Officer Leitch drops his pen and looks up at the ceiling.

“My eyes are good until about 1 a.m.,” he sighs. “After that they’re shot.”

Leitch will be working until about 7:30 this morning. After 3 a.m., he’ll be the only APD officer on duty.

The bars now closed and the streets emptying, Leitch is settling in for a few quiet hours of paperwork. But he says this lonely stretch, which he is working for eight days in a row, provides some rare joy.

“There’s about an hour, between 4 and 5 a.m., when there’s just nobody out on the streets,” Leitch says. “I go out and walk downtown Aspen and I have it all to myself.”

No more arrests would be made that morning. After being booked and photographed, the two women at the jail would post bond and be released separately at 3:30 and 6 a.m. And, other than a few minor complaints, there would be sparse radio chatter from the dispatch room.

“The best part about this shift is sunrise,” Leitch says. “Sometimes I drive out to the roundabout and go up Maroon Creek Road a bit. From there you can see the sun come up and hit Pyramid Peak. It makes you glad it’s another day.”