Laramie County Sheriff At It Again: Puts Red Neon Vacancy Sign Over Jail

The Laramie County Sheriff’s Office has put a hotel-like blinking “VACANCY” 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 sheriff’s 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.

“We put (the sign) up to make sure everyone knows we’re open for business. We take people to the jail that need to be arrested,” said Kozak.

He said he believes his deputies’ 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.  

“We’re making it clear we have vacancy, so criminals are welcome in our jail,” he added.

The sign is very conspicuous over the north door of the detention center at the busy intersection of Pioneer Avenue and 20^th Street in downtown Cheyenne.

This isn’t Kozak’s 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 Colorado’s laws that are less friendly to law enforcement than Wyoming’s.

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 that’s the highest Kozak can remember its population being.

Statistics for Cheyenne on city-data.com say the city’s theft rates went from “bigger” than the state average to “much bigger” than the state average in 2020, and that they remained in the “much bigger” 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 — and exceeding it drastically in 2021 and 2022.

Crime in Cheyenne increased by 2% in 2023, according to the Cheyenne Police Department’s annual report, released in March of last year. 

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 sheriff’s office also lets people participate in a game of “Clink-O,” 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.

“I walk through the jail all the time and they always — it’s funny — some of the inmates say, ‘Hey, you got me when I saw I was the winner on Clink-O,’” he said.

Contact Clair McFarland at clair@cowboystatedaily.com

Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.