Colby, Kan.
From the law enforcement blotter of the Colby Free Press newspaper:
Saturday Sept. 2. Suspicious incident: A person called the sheriff’s office at 12:46 p.m. saying yield signs were taken out of the ground and left in the ditch at County Road F and County Road 13. The sheriff’s department explained that the Thomas County Road Department had removed the signs while working on the road.
It’s a quiet place, this Kansas town just east of the Colorado border. The wind rustles through the cornstalks of the autumn fields and people don’t give much thought to things like crime. Or traffic. Or trees.
With urban migration showing no sign of slowing – more than 75 percent of Americans now live in or around cities – Colby could be the poster boy for the thousands of dot-on-the-map towns that have begun a slow fade. Its population has dipped by some 300 people in the past five years. Today, the town with the brick streets is home to 5,145 people. Denver buzzes along some 220 miles to the west. Kansas City is 375 miles to the east. They might as well be a million miles away.
Sept. 3. Police were called at 3:48 a.m. about someone knocking on the door of a home on North Country Club Drive. When police arrived the caller opened the door and said she realized it was a roommate.
Kent Dible is a sergeant on the Colby Police force, one of 12 officers in the department. He began working as Colby Police dispatcher just a few days shy of his 18th birthday. He is 49 now.
“This town has everything that anyplace else has, just less of it,” he said, sitting in an office in the small law enforcement center that sits in the shadow of the towering brick 1906 Thomas County Courthouse.
“The kids at Colby Community College like to decorate their rooms with yard art,” he said.
Yard art, he said, can be anything Colbians put on their lawns. Garden gnomes. Flamingos.
“Lots of little animals,” Sgt. Dible said, referring to the ceramic mammals such as squirrels and skunks, not the college students.
And so on a Friday night the police might be called to a loud party in a rented house. And they bring the list. The list is an important tool in solving crime. Officially it’s called the hot list. Not much more than a handful of scribbled notes, the list contains anything reported stolen or suspected of being stolen.
And the police do mean anything.
“We’ll knock on the door at a loud party to check it out,” Dible said, “and there in the corner of the room are two reindeer. Lawn reindeer. So we’ll make a note of the reindeer and the address and eventually they’ll probably match a theft report.”
Sept. 1. A bicycle was found at 8:37 p.m. laying in the front yard of a residence in the 100 block of South School Avenue. A report was filed.
“It’s a nice town. People from Denver and Wichita stop in and say there’s nothing to do,” Dible said. And then he laughed.
“My wife is a bowler. I hunt and fish. And we play cards with friends,” he said. “That’s what we do.”
Sept. 25. Suspicious person. Police were called at 9:18 p.m. to investigate a person who was whistling and yelling in the 200 block of North Country Club Drive.
“My brother lived in Denver for a while,” Dible said. “I’d visit him. We’d go to the Natural History Museum. There was so much to do. But I always wanted to come home after a few days. It was a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
Sept. 27. Suspicious incident. Police were notified at 6:57 p.m. of a juvenile shooting another juvenile with a BB gun in the 800 block of South Court.
Dible, who grew up in the smaller (populaton 400) town of Rexford, some 18 miles through the corn and wheat fields to the northeast, said the best part of towns like Colby is that residents are concerned about, well, about everything. From yield signs lying in a ditch to someone shouting and whist ling to one kid shooting another kid in the behind with a BB gun.
“We take care of our kids,” he said.
And boy, is he not kidding.
Sept. 20. Police were called at 8:21 p.m. to Pine and Country Club Streets. Caller said two children were playing in the street.
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
