The Denver City Council’s agent of change and de facto leader Candi CdeBaca is planning to have the City Council pass a bill to change the City Charter to allow Denver voters to elect the city’s Sheriff as is the case almost everywhere else in Colorado. Given the disaster the Sheriff’s Department has become, the voters could not do worse than Hancock’s picks over the last nine years. Even the union representing the Sheriff deputies believes that such a reform is long past due.
It is difficult to catalog all of the scandals that have befallen the office over the last few years, starting with the death of mentally ill Michael Lee Marshall while in custody. The lawsuits alone have cost the taxpayers a staggering amount of money, including the most recent $1.55 million settlement paid to 15 female Sheriff deputies for “severe and unwelcome sexual harassment by male inmates . . . fostered by the failure of the Sheriff’s Department to take reasonable steps to prevent it.” The next big hit to the taxpayers will be from the female inmate forced to give birth to a child alone in a Denver jail cell.
Denver Sheriff Patrick Firman resigned effective October 14 after years of mistrust from deputies and community activists, who said that was the price of filling the position with a man who was never the right person for the job. “Nice guy, just wasn’t suited to be Sheriff,” said Lisa Calderón, chief of staff for Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca.
If he were so ill suited for the job, why in the world was he appointed by Mayor Hancock in 2015 after a long search process? Because it was a workie, workie like everything else the Mayor does. If you think anything is going to change as long as the Mayor gets to appoint the Sheriff, you would be mistaken. For the interim Sheriff, Hancock has appointed a woman, Fran Gomez, who is even more unqualified than Firman. She was briefly with the Sheriff’s Department in the 1980s and then after years doing police work in Aurora and Commerce City she retired. In August of last year she apparently unretired and got the “no work” job in the Sheriff’s Department as the “Director of Professional Standards.”
What caused the sudden hiring and incredible rise through the ranks to the top in a little over a year? According to the Deputy Sheriff’s union it is due to the fact she is the wife of one of Hancock’s security detail. Hancock apparently counted on that fact being obscured by the fact she is the “first” female Denver Sheriff of any sort and has a Hispanic last name. Almost everyone expects that under Ms. Gomez things will go from bad to even worse at the jail. This will be followed by the appointment of another gross incompetent as the permanent Denver Sheriff.
Denver’s citizens really do not have to put up with this pathetic hiring carousel for the Sheriff position. We should choose the best candidate for Sheriff ourselves. Voters are not perfect of course, as evidenced by the fact we have elected Michael Hancock three times. But candidates for the office will have to at least try to convince us why they would be well-suited for the job. We can’t do a whole lot worse than choosing as interim Sheriff a person whose only qualification is that she is the wife of a man on the Mayor’s security detail.
The positions directly below the Sheriff are also presently political patronage jobs chosen by the Mayor for all of the wrong reasons. An elected Sheriff could at least pick individuals he/she believes are best suited to help do what is a very hard job, rather than simply to people whom a Mayor owes a favor.
Having an elected Sheriff is only the beginning of the process to provide some checks and balances in the City Charter over present and future corrupt and out-of-control Mayors.
Lord Acton famously stated: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
It is time in Denver for a little less absolute power and a lot less public corruption.
— Editorial Board