Pueblo Sheriff Kirk Taylor: Over-booked, but not under-staffed
A strain on local law enforcement is evident, but Pueblo County Sheriff Kirk Taylor says his agency suffers from different perils than the police department does.
The seasoned lawman has been at the helm of the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office since 2006 — and he said he isn’t ruling out running for reelection in 2018.
Pueblo County Sheriff Kirk Taylor’s time in office has been, if anything, political — from the newsworthy illegal marijuana grow stings to attempting to fund a new jail through a half-cent sales tax — and while Taylor has no stake in the the November election this year, there will be votes that impact his agency.
“I don’t work for the council, I don’t work for the commissioners. I’m an independent, constitutionally elected sheriff for four years,” he told PULP. “I work for the people directly.”
He oversees three bureaus. Law enforcement, detention, and emergency services. Taylor is also the fire warden for the 2,300 square miles in his jurisdiction.
An assertive leader, Taylor is about hard data and doesn’t hesitate to point his opponents and critics toward numbers. And while he said he detests anecdotes, he used them frequently in this interview.
The following is an edited interview with Kirk Taylor and undersheriff J.R. Hall about the questions most often asked of the sheriff’s office and what the future might hold for an aging jail.
There seems to be a perception that the crime rate has spiked in Pueblo since 2014. Is that the case?
Taylor: It really depends on how you define “crime.” A uniform crime report is done every year. I don’t think a lot of people know the difference between the Sheriff’s office and the City Police Department. One part of our agency is a Law Enforcement Bureau that is very similar to a city police department, which is solely responsible for law enforcement.
Hall: The last we checked, PPD — the city of Pueblo — has a crime rate of about 6–7 percent and PCSO had a crime rate of between 3 and 3.4 percent, but no one ever assimilates that.
In 2015, the CBI reported 1,499 offenses and 864 arrests in Pueblo County 2015, while the report showed that Pueblo Police Department had 9,137 offenses and 3,120 arrests the same year.
We hear about the Pueblo Police Department a lot and how they suffer from being extremely understaffed. Is the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office understaffed?
Taylor: Nobody has ever heard me say that I’m understaffed in law enforcement.
We are understaffed in the jail. When they moved the judicial building, we did a study and the data showed that we need 36 additional full-time employees because the move created the need to use transportation to move prisoners whereas before we could utilize a tunnel system. Even though we’ve streamlined, additional costs were added to the budget. Every year that the jail is here and the courthouse is six blocks away, it is an additional $1.2 million for transports. We never transported prisoners before the new judicial building was built.
In 2014, I was given 14 full-time employees. I shut down the work release program because the commissioners couldn’t staff me the way I needed to be staffed. In 2016, I received nine more staff. That is a total of 23. I’m staffed appropriately for 2014, not for 2016.
As my jail population grows, higher risk inmates often have to be housed with lower risk inmates. Ideally, jails should run at 85 percent of capacity for inmates to be housed appropriately. We are 137 percent over capacity. When you get over capacity, you lose the ability to separate inmates based on their risk assessment scores in order to keep calm in the jail. In these cases, the safety of inmates and deputies is compromised.
Hall: When the sheriff came on board in 2006, he changed the staffing needs in patrol — going from a 10-hour shift, which is highly manpower intensive, to five 8-hour shifts which allow for more shifts and more people. The staff was upset with this change but it reduced overtime and increased coverage substantially thereby deploying resources most effectively.
So crime isn’t up, you’re not understaffed. But the jail overcrowded. What factors go into that.
Hall: If you look at the numbers, there is an uptick in the length of inmates’ stay.
Taylor: We’re booking the same amount of people every year, but our jail population is increasing exponentially — 717 as of today — for a facility which has a maximum capacity of 509. The facility was designed to accommodate 19 females — 174 females are currently incarcerated.
We’ve had the same amount of bookings, we’re arresting the same amount of people but the population in our jail is going up.
The average length of stay has increased from 23 to 32 days since 2006. The jail’s average daily population has increased from 527 in 2006 to 630 in 2015. People should not be staying in jail for that long. The reasons for this include an increase in mentally ill inmates, a lot more requirements, and programs or classes that are required by the state.
If the criminal justice system is working the way it is supposed and designed to work, they should not stay in jail that long before getting their day in court.
Other contributors are the district attorney’s office may be understaffed and a lack of public defenders prompt cases to be extended over longer periods of time.
Do efforts to curb illegal marijuana grows put unnecessary strain on PCSO resources?
Taylor: Yes, it takes a lot of our time, but it doesn’t take up that much of our time that we’re not doing other things.
Hall: Is it an unnecessary strain? Yes. But is a strain we’ll continue to do? Yes.
Taylor: What we are busting is illegal. When they passed 64, they didn’t get rid of Title 18, which is what we deal with — the criminal code — so we’re just doing our job and responding to the request of the citizens. We have probably 40 calls on a list right now of different situations we need to go look at. We prioritize them and we go do our job. That is really all there is to it.
Storage of confiscated marijuana is an issue and it continues to be an issue. We have started to get convictions — we got our second the other day — so we are able to destroy some of the marijuana, marijuana-related paraphernalia and equipment that have been confiscated in busts.
What is your official stance on recreational marijuana?
Taylor: My stance is on the side of democracy and my stance has not changed. I don’t think that the commissioners should decide that for us — right or wrong. The county commissioners said that we have a mandate based on the vote of 64 and I disagreed. If you break out the vote, and I did, it didn’t pass in the unincorporated portion of Pueblo County — the city carried it. But the commissioners only had jurisdiction over the unincorporated areas — so they invited the industry here.
Has your budget changed since Amendment 64?
Taylor: If you look at my budget for this year, it’s less than it was in 2009. In seven years, it hasn’t changed.
Hall: The salaries for the nine additional employees we got (in 2014) came out of our own budget. They never increased our budget. They literally dove into our budget and gave us our own people out of our own budget.
