Say this much for Patrick Firman, who will be sworn in Friday as the next sheriff for the City and County of Denver: He’s an outsider, which is what the department desperately needs.
Indeed, he’s more than an outsider geographically. He comes from a distinctly different cultural milieu as well. Firman hails from a non-urban county in Illinois that includes outer suburbs of Chicago but also plenty of agriculture. And it’s not nearly as diverse ethnically as Denver.
Whether that will be a disadvantage in handling Denver’s troubled jail remains to be seen. But if Mayor Michael Hancock was looking for a “fresh perspective,” as he said Thursday at a press conference, he certainly found one.
Firman describes himself as a “career corrections guy” who worked his way up the ladder, and says the challenges here are typical of ones faced by a lot of departments. But he also admits he’ll have a “learning curve” in Denver. No doubt. He’s already learned, from reading consultants’ reports and city-generated analyses, just how badly off course his new agency went. From hiring and firing procedures, to the way discipline was meted out, to the abuse or neglect of prisoners, to its own internal investigations — you name it, in fact — the Denver sheriff’s department has been rocked by scandals.
And the hits just keep on coming. In recent days, interim sheriff Elias Diggins has had to apologize for disparaging the motives of those who pushed the firing of a former sheriff’s chief and now finds himself under police investigation, over accusations he set free a man in custody on an assault warrant.
Firman will come into his job without any of the scratch-my-back attitudes revealed by Diggins’ comments — attitudes that seem to have characterized much of agency behavior in recent years. But he’ll need to be a bold leader, too, which the mayor Thursday assured the public is the case.
It’s no secret that we’ve been critical of how long it’s taken Denver to hire a new sheriff given the turmoil in the department for more than 18 months. Firman should have been a co-architect of the reforms rather than inheriting a fully formed “roadmap … to fix that which needs fixing,” as the mayor put it. But now that the new sheriff does have a roadmap, he needs to implement it without further ado.
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