You can measure Ed Valerio’s worth to Denver and its Police Department with a silk rose and a birthday card. Valerio purchased neither. They came from “The Boys.” That’s what Valerio called Rick and Dio.
“How are ‘The Boys’?” Valerio’s wife would ask. The answer depended. They weren’t Valerio’s kids. They were two guys among the crowd of drunken, mentally ill and drug-addled homeless whom many of us who live in the city find creepy.
Valerio, who retires Saturday after 30 years as a cop, stared at their trauma without judging them.
So when Valerio’s wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, “The Boys” passed along concern and hope in the form of a silk rose, like any friend or neighbor.
Ditto for Valerio’s birthday.
“I was on vacation,” said Valerio, who patrolled his downtown beat on a bike the past six years. Rick and Dio “hunted down a guy I sometimes rode with and gave him a birthday card to give to me.”
A rare mixture of compassion and tough love inspired this. Valerio, now 62, not only made Denver safer; he made it nobler. You could witness that any morning in nooks and on sidewalk grates that the down-and-out turned into bedrooms.
“Wake up,” Valerio would say with a gentle tap. “Time to move along.”
“If they don’t get up,” Valerio explained the other morning as he cleared several guys off the sidewalk across from the convention center, “I give ’em a snooze alarm. If they still don’t get up, I turn into a policeman.”
A balancing act is the legacy Ed Valerio leaves his son, Josh, who hopes to take over his dad’s bicycle beat. Josh, 28, wears his commitment to law enforcement on his arm, not his sleeve. The words “Denver Police” are tattooed in Japanese along his triceps. But the desire to be a bike officer and help the homeless comes from what he has seen – and for the last four months helped – his dad do.
For now, Josh Valerio patrols on a bike along and around Cherry Creek near some of the city’s richest neighborhoods. “The land of latte,” he calls it. His pop says it is a place the wealthy must leave “to see where the real people live.”
Two latte-land joggers recently complained to the Valerios about a homeless drunk asleep near their running path. The joggers probably would have been disappointed at the reaction. With a partly filled liquor bottle near him, the drunk violated city ordinances. The Valerios told him to pour out the remaining booze and get on his way.
“At times you have to be a policeman,” Ed Valerio said. “But if I’d give ’em a ticket, I’d sometimes hold it in abeyance. I didn’t clear ’em.” Then, when it was “really, really cold,” Valerio served the citation and put the homeless person in jail. “That way they were off the street,” he said. But “they didn’t have to spend a cold night out on the street.”
That’s Valerio. He took no guff recently as he walked among makeshift shanties along the South Platte River north of downtown. Take down the tents and leave, he told residents of a place where police have found prostitution and drugs. Josh, who on this day rode with his dad as a tribute, rousted folks from structures made of tarps, sheets, cardboard and branches. Then, father and son mounted bikes and headed back through the city.
Past the place where Ed Valerio had greeted a friend towing his worldly belongings in a small wagon.
Past the place where father and son had linked a young couple from Connecticut with the Coalition for the Homeless. The couple said they worked at Pepsi Center but slept under bridges because they’d been bilked of savings and had yet to earn enough to get a place to live.
Past Civic Center, where Ed Valerio found his pal Rick, whose real name was Samuel Burrier, frozen to death in 2003.
Dio tried to break free of his demons. With Valerio’s help, Dio returned to Florida to live with his sister.
“He was back in six months,” Valerio said. “I was disappointed. But he’s doing better now. At least he has an apartment.”
The old cop spoke with a patience and understanding few of us possess, but that just might be a city’s salvation.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-954-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
