AURORA | The Adams County Jail last week turned away a convicted car thief and six other defendants sentenced to jail by Aurora city judges, police said, further fueling a spat between the sheriff and city leaders.
The refusal is the first since the county instituted a cap on municipal inmates in 2012 and added to an already testy situation between Adams County Sheriff Doug Darr and city leaders around the county over how many city inmates the jail will house.
Aurora police Chief Dan Oates and the chiefs from Westminster, Brighton, Commerce City and Thornton announced the refusal at a press conference Tuesday afternoon. The chiefs said they took the rare move of publicly criticizing another law enforcement officer because the jail’s refusal to accept convicted criminals poses a threat to public safety.
“We don’t like to be in the position we are in,” Oates said.
The refusal happened May 20 when city marshals brought the defendant to the jail in Brighton. Oates said that at the jail entrance, jailers refused to take the man. That defendant, as well as six other inmates turned away last week by Adams County, are now being housed at the Denver County Jail, where Aurora has had an agreement for housing municipal inmates since the Adams County cap took effect.
Oates said the seven inmates turned away were sentenced on misdemeanor charges including shoplifting, trespassing, drugs, battery, prostitution and car theft. Beyond those misdemeanor charges, Oates said the defendants have been arrested a combined 36 times on felony charges in the past, and faced misdemeanor charges 64 times.
The inmates pose a genuine threat to public safety and need to be locked up, 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.
Darr said Tuesday afternoon that he is looking into the chiefs’ complaints and will likely issue a response Wednesday. But in general, Darr said the cap on municipal inmates is necessary because the jail doesnt have the staff to oversee as many inmates as the cities send.
“This is a staffing and volume issue. It’s about having enough resources to make sure the jail is a reasonably safe place to work and a reasonably safe place to house inmates,” he said.
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limit has been controversial since it took effect in early 2012 and in April this year, county commissioners formally rescinded it.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. On the day Oates said the jail turned away the car thief, the deputy who runs the jail sent an email to Aurora Municipal Court Judge Richard Weinberg saying there were 40 municipal inmates at the jail, and more than 10 came from Aurora.
“We have been very tolerant in allowing the municipal inmate numbers to exceed the sheriff’s cap, however, I can no longer allow this to continue to the degree it has,” Deputy Kurt Ester said in the email.
Jail officials have regularly warned city officials that they were exceeding the cap, but last week 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.
“The taxpayers are paying for a level of service, and they are not getting that level of service,” Thornton police Chief Randy Nelson said.
The cities have taken various steps to try to deal with the inmate cap, the chiefs said. In Aurora, judges are sentencing defendants to weekend jail stints in the city jail, which can hold inmates for a maximum of three days.
Still, even after the cities have taken those steps, jail officials have not taken steps to make the jail cap less restrictive or to find other solutions to the staffing woes, Nelson said.
“There has to be some reciprocity here,” he said.