"Def(endant) brought in was wrong defendant . . . Go figure!"
How many mistaken-identity arrests does it take to make you angry?
For me, one was enough — a mom snatched from her home in Sterling and jailed in Denver because the city figured she was someone she isn't.
Then came another case, and another and another. Victim after victim has told how they were arrested and thrown behind bars because of sloppy police work.
A former city worker was mistaken for a man who was long dead. A student was held for a week without a court appearance and forced to answer to another man's name. And a 21-year-old was jailed more than four months on a warrant for a suspect with a discernibly different physical description.
In the two years since Christina FourHorn, the Sterling mom, went public about her ordeal, the city has tried to shrug off its screw-ups as anomalies. Officials estimate only a few ID errors have been made among thousands of inmates.
"Handling so many people as we do, a couple mistakes are bound to happen," the undersheriff once told me.
But Denver's little problem may be far bigger than the city admits. Since 2002, 219 more people seem to have been wrongly held, court documents and sheriffs' records indicate.
For every hour some were held, they probably missed work, school and other responsibilities. For every day some spent behind bars, someone at home probably was panicking. And for every week the city's mistakes went unacknowledged, taxpayers' bills in potential civil rights settlements were rising.
"Wrong defendant brought into court. A female. The defendant Jamie Sandoval is male," one court order reads.
"Called Def(endant's) Wife. Valerie is upset because her husband keeps getting arrested for another person named Vasquez," reads another.
And here's my favorite: "Def(endant) brought in was wrong defendant . . . Go figure!"
Dozens of apparent errors have been made since the city pledged to mend its ways in 2007 after settling a lawsuit for jailing a woman whose identity it had mistaken. Innocent people continued to be misidentified after Safety Manager Al LaCabe said sheriff's deputies are making "every effort to ensure they are correctly identifying suspects." And problems persist long since John Hickenlooper deigned to address the issue, albeit minimally.
"We are committed to preventing this type of situation from happening again," he told me a year ago this week.
The mayor who now wants to be governor has been all too tolerant of his safety department, especially his police ID bureau, and its continuing failure to make sure it locks up the right people.
His office questions the scale of the problem, arguing "There is no way to know — without going through each case — how many of the cases in the documents involve actual ID problems that involved a deputy or court mistake."
Hickenlooper is being suckered by safety officials who blame errors on the fact that some arrestees, big shock, lie about their identities.
Since deputies finally started logging wrongful identity complaints in August, 24 inmates have claimed they were hauled in on somebody else's warrant. As it turns out, eight were telling the truth.
That's 33 percent, hardly a statistical anomaly. The dozens of other people who apparently fell victim to Denver's snafus don't exactly qualify as "a couple mistakes."
Again, the question goes — how many of the wrong people will Denver lock up until the public gets outraged and officials finally feel the heat?
"Def(endant) brought in was wrong defendant . . . Go figure!"