The best I can say about the case of De De Davis is that Denver police didn’t engage in racial profiling.
But officers’ colorblindness in picking up a black woman on a white woman’s warrant reflects the department’s recklessness as a sixth victim of mistaken identity comes forward to tell her story.
Davis’ problems began one day in June 2007 walking home from picking up milk at a gas station. She was 100 feet from her east Denver apartment when, she says, “swarms of police” surrounded her and four of her kids.
Her 3-year-old had his hands up. Her 10-year-old was being frisked. And her 1-year-old was screaming, she says, as one cop yelled something about one of the kids having a gun before another mentioned, mistakenly, that Jefferson County had a warrant for Davis’ arrest.
“I said, ‘You’ve got the wrong people.’ I offered to go in and get my ID. They just kept telling me to ‘Shut the (expletive) up,’ ” says Davis, a customer-service rep and single mom who studies sociology in all her spare time.
She wrings her hands when remembering the look on her baby’s face as he watched police handcuff and force her into a cop car. And she cries when recalling how her 3-year-old ran after as the cruiser pulled away.
Fury tinges Davis’ voice when she tells how one officer mused, “This makes no sense to me,” presumably after comparing police records about a white woman to the reality of Davis’ brown skin.
“They were questioning me like I wasn’t me,” she says.
Police found no gun on Davis or her kids, charging her instead with interfering with a police officer and disobeying a lawful order. She pleaded guilty just to go home.
But deputies still wouldn’t release her, citing a warrant for which they said she might have to wait 10 more days in jail until Jefferson County would come and haul her off.
That warrant was for a woman named Brandy Hair — whom, as it turns out, Denver police had arrested two days earlier on drug-possession charges. Hair happens to be 13 years younger than Davis. Not to mention white. Which is no minor oversight, given that Davis is black.
“Duh,” she says.
Davis finally managed to bail out after three days in the Denver jail. The bond money put her behind on her rent, triggering so many late fees that she had to pack up her kids and move out to avoid eviction.
They spent months living with relatives and in shelters, unable to rent an apartment while Brandy Hair’s drug charge hung over Davis’ head.
Police refuse comment on Davis’ case because lawyers at the ACLU are trying to add her to a list of five other plaintiffs in a civil-rights lawsuit challenging Denver’s habit of disappearing the wrong people.
Among those plaintiffs are a Sterling mother the city mistook for a suspect weighing 90 pounds less.
The city needlessly locked up a disabled former Denver sanitation worker four times, including once even after the man police really wanted was dead.
And deputies held a Latino construction worker for 26 days in lieu of a man with a discernibly different name, telling his pregnant wife he was lying to her about his identity.
Mayor John Hickenlooper has remained silent about the mistaken-identity problem that has festered under his watch. Somehow, you’d think a mayor who expounds so often about “imagining a great city” might ask his cops to think twice before once again snatching innocent people away from their families and tossing them behind bars.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
