His many critics must have seen it as poetic justice – kind of like the hitch he served in a Colorado prison for tax evasion. Even some of his loyalists must have snickered. Here was the guy who has spent decades telling high-and-mighty pols and lowly government functionaries which pier they could jump off of – getting a heaping helping of his own attitude.

From the Colorado Springs chief of police, no less.

As reported Monday by our news affiliate The Gazette, tax-limitation author, veteran political activist and convicted felon Douglas Bruce, of Colorado Springs, wanted no part of an intensive police search the other night for a missing local teen-ager. Bruce was in fact irked at the phone alerts he and his neighbors received that evening about the 15-year-old autistic girl, who was believed to be in the area and ultimately was located unharmed.

The Gazette’s Kaitlin Durbin reports:

Bruce had asked the chief by email to stop city calls to him unless they relate to “specific crimes against me and my property.” He wrote that he was awakened about 10:30 p.m. Saturday by a call about a missing at-risk teenager in the Laredo Ridge Drive area, “wherever that is,” and again shortly before midnight with news that the girl had been found.

“TRY to exercise some judgment and common sense about the timing of random calls to citizens,” Bruce wrote. “This CSPD practice must be stopped.”

… “What do you expect me to DO at midnight about some juvenile in the city who does not tell her parents where she is? … I have no role in finding other people’s thoughtless or runaway children.”

Colorado Springs Police Chief Pete Carey’s email comeback amounted to a rare turnabout that evidently left the notoriously abrasive Bruce flabbergasted – “shocked,” he later complained:

“I regret that the phone notifications took you from your beauty rest. In truth, the beauty rest ain’t working anyway,” Carey wrote.

… Carey replied to Bruce that his “complete lack of care, concern and compassion for anyone but yourself fits perfectly with your obnoxious and bullying personality.”

The teen was found “due partly to the advisories that went out,” Carey wrote.

Bruce one day might be the missing person for whom public help is sought, the chief wrote. “Perhaps not, as that would actually require someone to miss you enough to make an initial report,” he added.

Carey told Bruce he would look into removing him from notifications “for anything but your sole, personal welfare, if you promise to remove my e-mail address from any more boorish correspondence you choose to send.”

Bruce, a former legislator and El Paso County commissioner, wrote the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, amended into the state constitution by Colorado voters in 1992. He was convicted in 2012 of three felonies including tax evasion and was sentenced to six months in jail and six years of economic probation. He was released from Denver County Jail after only 104 days on good behavior but then was convicted last year of violating terms of his probation and was sentenced to two years in prison. He was released from Delta Correctional Facility last Sept. 3, after less than six months.