AURORA | The feud between the Adams County Jail and leaders in Aurora and other municipalities continued last week with the two sides trading barbs over the jail’s controversial inmate limit.
Sheriff Doug Darr said last week that his jailers turned away an Aurora car thief May 20 only after Aurora officials ignored complaints that the city was exceeding its allotted number of municipal inmates.
That refusal sparked a flare-up in a simmering fight between the county and the cities that rely on the jail for housing convicted criminals from city courts. Local police chiefs publicly criticized Darr for the refusal, marking a rare public spat between law enforcement leaders who generally find themselves on the same side of the issues.
In response to the chiefs’ complaints about the jail’s controversial limit on municipal inmates, Darr said Aurora had 15 municipal inmates in the jail when the car thief was turned away. That’s almost four times the limit of four that the city is supposed to have based on a cap instituted in 2012.
Darr said his jailers reached out to the city to tell Aurora court leaders that the city was again exceeding the limit, but nobody from Aurora replied.
“Unfortunately we could not get a return call,” Darr said.
When city marshals delivered the convicted car thief to the jail May 20, jailers refused to take the man. Since, the jail has refused another six people convicted in Aurora Municipal Court of low-level offenses.
The jail’s decision led to harsh criticism from several area police chiefs on Tuesday, including Aurora police Chief Dan Oates, who said the move puts public safety at risk. The inmates need to be in jail because they pose a risk, Oates said.
“I don’t think anybody disputes that, particularly the next person whose car he would steal if he weren’t in jail,” Oates said after the chiefs’ press conference last week.
But Darr stressed that the inmates are still locked up, just at the Denver jail, where Aurora has an agreement to house municipal inmates that Adams County won’t take.
The issue, Darr said, is that cities like Aurora regularly sentence petty criminals to county jail sentences, often on charges that had they been filed in a state or county court, could not land someone in jail by law.
Those inmates further tax an understaffed jail that is already “bursting at the seams,” Darr said.
Still, leaders in Aurora and other cities point out that the municipal offenders make up such a tiny portion of the jail — only about 5 percent of inmates — that the sheriff needs to find other solutions to his crowding issues.
Darr countered Wednesday that the municipal inmates are the “lowest level, nonviolent offenders” in the jail, so it makes the most public safety sense to limit them, as opposed to other inmates who pose a greater threat to the community.
And, the sheriff said, cities have jailed inmates for truly minor offenses. One homeless man was sentenced to a year in jail for loitering, Darr said, others have been jailed for failing to get their dogs rabies shots, or for petty alcohol violations.
Darr said he offered to bump the municipal-inmate cap from 30 to 60 inmates, but the cities had to agree to no longer jail municipal offenders for those petty offenses.
“They declined. They told me they didn’t want anyone telling them what to do,” he said,
But Judge Richard Weinberg, the presiding judge at Aurora Municipal Court, said Darr’s offer was far from simple. Under state law, prostitution could be considered a petty offense, Weinberg said, and city officials were worried that Darr’s terms would have barred them from jailing prostitutes.
Plus, Aurora is a home-rule city where an elected city council decides what laws will be enforced, and how. Accepting Darr’s terms would have stripped them of that responsibility, he said.
“They are the elected officials from the city. They need to be able to make those decisions,” he said.
As for the low-level criminals jailed by municipal courts, Weinberg said the sheriff’s contention that they are unworthy of jail time is simply false.
“These are people that are criminals by nature. Simply because they committed a relatively minor offense doesn’t mean that jail is inappropriate,” he said.
Weinberg said he looked specifically at the animal violations that landed defendants in court. Just once in recent years has a defendant from municipal court been sentenced to jail for an animal violation, he said, and in that case, the defendant was charged three times and refused to pay their fines in each case.
“Eventually, you run out of options and you give somebody like that a jail sentence,” he said.
As for the loitering cases, Weinberg said the only loitering charge that can carry a jail sentence is loitering in a drug zone. In those cases, police have to prove the defendant was trying to buy or sell drugs.
The county’s inmate limit has been controversial since it took effect in early 2012 and in April this year, county commissioners formally rescinded it. But Darr said it would be at least 18 months before he was able to hire and train enough jailers to handle more inmates.
The cap means the jail will only house 30 inmates a day from municipal courts around the county, which tend to handle lower-level crimes. Before the cap, the jail housed about 120 municipal offenders each day.
Since the cap began, Aurora has used more than 1,100 “bed days” at the Denver jail at a cost of more than $60,000.
The Adams County jail still houses hundreds of inmates arrested in Aurora as long as they are prosecuted in county or district court.
For Aurora, the municipal inmate cap has meant only about four beds for municipal inmates, down from about 20 each day. But the cap hasn’t been firm and the cities regularly exceed the number of beds allotted. Jail officials have regularly warned city officials that they were exceeding the cap, but May 20 marked the first time they barred an inmate from the jail.
Aurora is the only city in Adams County that has seen a municipal inmate refused, but the chiefs from the other cities said it could easily be their inmates who are barred from jail in the future.
From the court’s perspective, the fight over jail space has been an unnecessary one, Weinberg said.
“We don’t want this fight,” he said. “We want to be able to house people where the citizens paid for them to be housed, it’s that simple.”