The Laramie County Sheriffâs Office has put a hotel-like blinking âVACANCYâ sign above its jail entrance to let suspected criminals know deputies will book them into the jail.
The red neon, all-caps sign is meant to let people know the jail has room, and that deputies are willing to book suspected criminals charged with crimes into the jail, Laramie County Sheriff Brian Kozak told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday.
The sheriff said people might need the reminder because for more than two years during the COVID-19 pandemic, the sheriffâs office under a prior administration suspended many of its booking protocols. Many people charged with property and other nonviolent crimes were purposely kept out of the jail until the latter half of 2022, Kozak said.
âWe put (the sign) up to make sure everyone knows weâre open for business. We take people to the jail that need to be arrested,â said Kozak.
He said he believes his deputiesâ current standard of going out and seeking suspected criminals is driving down crime in Cheyenne and Laramie County, though the area is still above the national average. Â
âWeâre making it clear we have vacancy, so criminals are welcome in our jail,â he added.
The sign is very conspicuous over the north door of the detention center at the busy intersection of Pioneer Avenue and 20th Street in downtown Cheyenne.
This isnât Kozakâs first time making a bold statement with a sign - or a unique activity.
Last spring, he used his advertising budget to place a billboard in the heart of Denver, Colorado, advertising open deputy positions to cops who may be dissatisfied with some of Coloradoâs laws that are less friendly to law enforcement than Wyomingâs.
Ahead of New Year's Eve, Kozak's office helped document the dangers of drunk driving by having Cowboy State Daily columnist Rod Miller drive through a course on a riding lawn mower. Miller got progressively drunker and worse at driving with each run.
Not Even Half Full
The jail has a capacity of about 450 and currently has about 170 inmates, he said.
Before COVID, the jail hit about 320 inmates, but thatâs the highest Kozak can remember its population being.
Statistics for Cheyenne on city-data.com say the cityâs theft rates went from âbiggerâ than the state average to âmuch biggerâ than the state average in 2020, and that they remained in the âmuch biggerâ range through 2022, with 1,821 thefts per 100,000 people. Auto thefts also spiked from bigger to much bigger in 2020, but now are down to the lesser of those two categories, at 268 per 100,000 people, according to the data.
A chart on that same page shows Cheyenne behind the national crime average consistently from 2012 to 2015, but exceeding the national crime average from 2016-2020 â and exceeding it drastically in 2021 and 2022.
Crime in Cheyenne increased by 2% in 2023, according to the Cheyenne Police Departmentâs annual report, released in March of last year.Â
The Cheyenne Police Department reported in July 2024, however, that crime figures went down for the first half of that year, compared with the first half of 2023, from 2,834 reported crimes to 2,274 across several different categories.
Got Me
Kozak noted that his agency keeps a public-facing most-wanted list to involve the public in crime-busting.
The sheriffâs office also lets people participate in a game of âClink-O,â a roulette style game in which the part of the most wanted list the token lands on determines the suspect on whom deputies will focus their tracking efforts most.
Even jail inmates are intrigued by the game, Kozak said.
âI walk through the jail all the time and they always â itâs funny â some of the inmates say, âHey, you got me when I saw I was the winner on Clink-O,ââ he said.
Contact Clair McFarland at clair@cowboystatedaily.com
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.