Fed up with criminals who consider fines or short stays in jail as merely the cost of doing business, police are using revised city ordinance to after the criminals’ tools, whatever they may be including cars, houses and restaurants.
On Tuesday, police took the dramatic action of crushing to criminals’ cars — one a meth dealer who used his Monte Carlo to deliver the poison and the other a habitual traffic offender who killed a 79-year-old woman walking across Colfax Avenue. Both car owners are in jail.
“You put them in jail and it’s nothing to them. But take away their car, or their house and they really start to cry,” said Denver Police Lt. Donna Starr-Gimeno, head of the public nuisance abatement unit.
A 1995 city ordinance, modified in 2005, now lets police use the civil side of the law to go after criminals by taking away their property. The police are careful not to make honest mistakes while confiscating someone’s property, but they’re going after bad guys in a big way.
In just the last six months of 2007, the nuisance abatement team grabbed 158 pieces of real estate and 1,143 cars. The houses and bars were taken for prostitution, narcotics and other crims. Most were returned but seven owners lost their places outright and two had to pay $30,000 each to get them back.
Of the cars, 571 were taken from habitual traffic offenders, 307 for narcotics, 103 for prostitution, 65 for weapons, 40 for eluding, 33 for drag racing and 18 for using the cars during robberies or burglaries. Two were used in drive-by shootings, two in indecent exposure cases, one for bootlegging alcohol and one from a mother who drove her 14-year-old daughter to a prostitution gig.
Last year, the unit, which has only five detectives, brought in $4 million in fines, fees and proceeds from sales.
Two weeks ago, the unit seized a house at 832 Garfield Street for selling hallucinogenic mushrooms out of it, Lt. Starr-Gimeno said, adding that the house was owned free-and-clear but the owners walked away from it.
In the past month, the unit also has filed actions against a whore house at 1728 Downing, an auto dealer at 5135 Emerson Street and Harry’s Bar at 629 E. Colfax Avenue for selling drugs over the bar, she said.
On Monday, the unit impounded a 2000 GMC, a 2000 Honda, a 2006 Jeep and five others.
“We’re trying to make it better to live in the city, to make the neighborhoods safer,” Starr-Gimone said.
Mike McPhee: 303-954-1409 or mmcphee@denverpost.com
