Fort Collins – Every week, a growing list of subscribers to The Bull Sheet learn about the dark comedies and sad tragedies jail personnel and patrol deputies face everyday.
A sister publication – The Bull’s-eye, Straight Shooting From the Sheriff – offers readers the unfiltered, and sometime controversial, opinions of a veteran lawman, Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden.
Both are attracting an audience of admirers because they provide an unvarnished, honest portrayal of life in law enforcement, said Alderden.
“The public really doesn’t understand what goes on in our everyday lives and what deputies and others here have to put up with,” Alderden said.
The Bull Sheet, a Closer Look at Your Sheriff’s Office, started about three months ago and is written by Deputy Eloise Campanella, who has been the spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Department for six years.
Alderden said he wanted something of more substance to share with employees than just a weekly update of employee birthdays and anniversaries.
“We wanted to have a little fun and to maybe inform people a little bit,” Alderden said.
So Campanella began gathering incident reports and logs from the detention center and patrol deputies to put together a weekly sampling of incidents in Larimer County.
Campanella also spices her items with wry comments and a little editorializing.
For instance: “A booking officer asked an inmate to provide a four-digit PIN for making phone calls from the jail. After several seconds of deep thought, the guy replied in all seriousness, ’12-12-12-12.’ Rocket scientists.”
Deputies last week also ran across a man with a heart condition who said his trained chipmunk usually warns him of an impending heart attack.
Campanella never uses names or confidential information. She says The Bull Sheet has been a morale booster among rank- and-file officers.
“We finally have a way of letting people know what we do here,” she said.
Her subscription list exceeds 350, and some of her items have been sent to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The guys over there keep saying ‘Just keep sending us The Bull Sheet. We’re having a ball with that,”‘ Campanella said.
Alderden, meanwhile, recently drew national attention from right-leaning media for his comments on concealed weapons in The Bull’s-eye.
The sheriff said the deadly shootings at Virginia Tech could have been avoided if students there had access to weapons.
Alderden said he received little flak for his statements.
“Just about everybody has backed me all the way,” he said.
The sheriff also has taken on the mental-health issue in Colorado, saying jails have become a dumping ground for the mentally ill because there isn’t enough funding to adequately house them.
Larimer County Commissioner Kathay Rennels said that although she’s never read The Bull Sheet or The Bull’s-eye, both missives provide valuable insights into the problems of law enforcement in the community.
“It gets people talking,” Rennels said, “and that’s what’s important.”
Staff writer Monte Whaley can be reached at 720-929-0907 or mwhaley@denverpost.com.
