“My husband said- we should put flood lights right on top of them, reeeaally bright lights”
Katharine Hauge is a physical therapist practicing at Functional Fitness in Boulder, Colorado and a member of the anti-homeless group Safer Boulder.
Katharine’s engagement on the leaked Safer Boulder Slack team is somewhat limited, but in her few posts she has defended a police officer involved in multiple use of force scandals and endorsed torturous techniques against people experiencing homelessness.
Excusing Police Brutality
On July 25, 2020, Katharine wrote a post defending former Boulder Police officer Waylon Lolotai who joined the Boulder Police Department after being placed on administrative leave by the Denver Sheriff’s Department for pushing an inmate into a flight of stairs while his back was turned. In the instance Katharine is referring to, Sammie Lawrence, a Black man with a walking stick, was filming Officer Lolotai during an engagement with a group of people experiencing homelessness in Boulder, Sammie was ordered to drop his walking aid and step back. When Sammie continued to film and use his walking aid, he was tackled by Officer Lolotai and arrested. Officer Lolotai recently resigned from the Boulder Police Department after accruing several more notable excessive force complaints and had his Instagram account scrutinized which featured memes and posts that glamorized police brutality against citizens and journalists.
Violence Against The Poor
In a hypothetical example identical to Sammie Lawrence’s case, Todd Root proposed duct taping someone practicing their First Amendment right to film the police and placing them next to a five gallon bucket of feces. Katharine gave this suggestion a Thumbs Up reaction.
On August 20th, 2020, Craig Book, Todd, and Katharine Hauge brainstormed methods of physically attacking a homeless encampment downtown, from shooting them with rubber bullets, to starving them, to using a torture technique employed at Guantanamo Bay.
On September 15th, Katharine Hauge wrote a post praising Safer Boulder on Facebook with the implication that she is simply a causal onlooker of their work, and not an active member of the group.