Monique Cummings stood outside the Ross Dress for Less on the 16th Street mall, telling two bicycle officers about a confrontation she’d just watched between a shopper and an off-duty Denver police officer who was providing security at the clothing store.
The off-duty officer had pinned the Black woman to the ground, Cummings told the cops. She thought he was going to kill her, so she tried to shove him off.
A man with a python hanging around his neck — a female snake named Cleo — stood a few feet away with cellphone video to show the two bicycle officers. In the background, a woman in a white tank top wore an adult diaper over red boxer shorts. She stood in front of a phone mounted at shoulder height on a monopod, waving her arms and loudly livestreaming from the sidewalk.
The mall was busy, packed with professionals, families with kids, construction workers. Passersby gave the woman in the diaper a wide berth. At the Ross, shoppers ducked past the two bicycle cops, the store security guard and the small crowd of clamoring witnesses at the store’s front doors with barely a second glance.
This was 16th Street on a sunny Monday afternoon.
The 13-block pedestrian corridor has become a lightning rod in the debate about Denver’s downtown: whether it is safe, whether it is pleasant, whether it is worth visiting. The area has experienced high business vacancy rates in recent years and has been under renovation for four years, work that city officials expect to wrap this year.
The corridor has been criticized for public drug use, homelessness and, at times, violence: an attacker killed two people and wounded two others in a spree of unprovoked stabbings along the mall in January. Authorities charged a 24-year-old man with a long history of mental illness with the attacks, which shook public confidence in downtown safety.
In April, weeks before rebranding the mall as just “16th Street,” Mayor Mike Johnston announced a new police focus on the street: a 10-member team of bicycle and horse-mounted officers patrolling the area between 14th and 18th streets, from Union Station to Broadway.
To learn more about the who police are encountering in this high-profile corridor, The Denver Post spent eight hours over two days in May following two members of that detail as they made arrests and issued citations along 16th Street — for obstruction, an open container of alcohol, for possessing fentanyl paraphernalia and for trespassing.
The Post then uncovered the stories of those people, discovering a U.S. Army veteran who lost his way, a woman who spent a decade living on the streets, a man with a history of alcohol-fueled crime, and another with an arrest record dating back 25 years.
The woman in the adult diaper was TikToker @AmberUnavailable, an account with almost 800,000 followers, The Post found. She travels from city to city, making videos and staying in Airbnb rentals. In recent posts, she put produce down her pants in grocery stores while bystanders ogled.
Cummings, who shoved the off-duty officer at the Ross, was visiting Denver from Georgia and was only in town for a few hours, she said. She was arrested for interfering with police.
When officers put her in handcuffs, she caught a reporter’s eye.
“It’s all right,” she said calmly. “Because if I wouldn’t have shoved him, he would have killed her.”
This was not Cummings’s first time going to jail.
Denver police officer Siena Riley, second from left, and officer James Cambria, center, talk to Monique Cummings, right, after an incident inside a Ross Dress for Less store on the 16th Street mall in Denver on May 12, 2025. Cummings' daughter, Tiandra Burns, is at left. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)‘Not ashamed of what I’ve been through’
Cummings’ mother was murdered at the age of 31, strangled to death on an August night in 1983, her body dumped in a wooded area in Jacksonville, Florida.
Cummings was 10. She remembers how her mom left to go to a family get-together, how she wanted the kids to come, too, but the siblings decided to stay home. Cummings, now 51, still wonders sometimes what would be different if she’d gone that night, and whether her mother would have lived.
“It haunts me to this day,” she said.
Her mother’s death sent Cummings into the foster care system, and she grew up rough, she said, describing herself as “from the hood.” She lives with bipolar disorder with schizophrenic tendencies. It runs in the family.
She’s been in trouble with the law routinely over the past two decades, court records show. She pleaded no contest to a 2011 robbery in Fort Lauderdale and was sentenced to two years in prison. She wrote a letter to the judge overseeing the case in 2014, asking that she be released early to help her daughter out of homelessness.
“For one full day, I contemplated every bad decision in my life,” she wrote from prison. “And came to the same conclusion in every scenario — I doomed my life for the things I could control. Wow. These decisions have cost me dearly.”
Cummings planned to seek mental health treatment, she wrote in the letter. After she got out, she was arrested in 2015 for using a stolen driver’s license to get a job, representing herself at work as the woman on the stolen license. A judge ordered that she undergo mental health treatment, and Cummings was found to be too mentally ill for the case to go forward. The charge was dismissed in 2021.
Cummings went on to plead no contest to a shoplifting charge in which she was accused of stealing $59 in children’s books from a Florida Hobby Lobby in 2022, court records show. She told the arresting officers she was depressed and felt like she should be in jail. The next year, she was arrested for running a stop sign and for possessing a small amount of bath salts, court records show. That case is pending in Florida.
For years, she’s been ready for a confrontation at the drop of a hat, Cummings said. But recently, she was out shopping with her grandchild and realized she was scaring the child. It was a turning point, she said. She sought out more treatment: anxiety medication and hypnotherapy.
“It has tremendously helped,” she said.
She and her daughter came to Colorado for her daughter’s court appearance on theft charges in Larimer County. They stopped by 16th Street after that to buy a carry-on suitcase at the Ross Dress for Less before their flight home that afternoon, Cummings said.
She watched the confrontation between the other shopper and the security officer and felt the shopper was being racially profiled, Cummings said. When the officer pinned the woman to the ground, Cummings thought she was doing the right thing by trying to shove him off.
Looking back on her arrest after returning home, Cummings felt it was a step forward for her. She showed more restraint than she would have in years past, she said.
“That situation made me know that I’m being healed,” she said. “(Before), I would have tackled that man and we would really have been going. But for me to just slightly push him, try not to harm him, just to make him aware of what he is doing… I know I did change. Back then, I’d have picked up a gun, a bottle, or anything.”
She was released from jail on a personal recognizance bond after a couple of hours at the Denver Downtown Detention Center. She missed her planned flight home, but caught one later that night, she said.
“I’m not ashamed of what I’ve been through,” she said. “It is what it is. That’s what God gave me. I dealt with it, I overcame it, I’m here.”
Denver police officers John Singapuri, left, and Siena Riley, right, patrol along 16th Street in Denver on May 13, 2025. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)Five months of bike patrols
Officers John Singapuri and Siena Riley zipped through 16th Street on heavy, camouflage-green electric bicycles. They said hello to business owners out on their patios, paused at stoplights and, every few minutes, told passing bicyclists that they can’t ride on the mall.
The street is closed to bicyclists, though they are ubiquitous. Singapuri and Riley give warnings for bike riding, not tickets.
They’ve patrolled downtown on bikes since January, focused on building relationships with downtown regulars — business owners, shopkeepers, nonprofits — but also proactively policing what Singapuri calls “quality of life” crimes. They look for public urination, drug use, trespassing, alcohol consumption — the stuff that actually impacts someone’s day. (Bicycle riding on the mall, not so much.)
When they started this route five months earlier — before the fatal stabbing spree — there was more open drug use along the street, Singapuri said. But as they’ve been consistently issuing citations, the drug use has shifted away from public view.
“For the most part, it’s way down,” he said. “It really is. …We still see a lot of the same people we were citing, but they’re not doing all the same stuff.”
Reported crime in the Union Station and Central Business District neighborhoods that cover the mall for the 180 days before June 9 is up about 27% when compared to the same six-month span last year, but is down about 8% when compared to that period in 2023, and down 31% from 2022, crime data maintained by the Denver Police Department shows. The department recorded 1,794 crimes in the two neighborhoods over the last six months, compared to 1,403 in that time frame last year, and 2,600 in that span in 2022.
Violent crime showed a similar pattern. For the 180-day span before June 9, the two neighborhoods recorded 146 violent crimes, compared to 142 in that time frame in 2024 and 157 in 2023. This year’s numbers are down about 18% from that six-month span in 2022, when police recorded 179 violent crimes.
Denver bicycle police officers Siena Riley, left, and John Singapuri, right, talk to a man who was sleeping near the 16th Street mall, while on patrol in Denver on May 13, 2025. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)Riley and Singapuri don’t interact with unhoused people who are not committing crimes, unless they’re unconscious. Then the officers will call out with a “Hey, are you OK?” or a “Denver police, do you need anything?” They’ll shake a person’s leg, or tap a shoulder. They move on when the person comes around.
The officers direct unhoused people to the Denver Outreach Court when they issue citations. It’s a subset of Denver County Court that meets at the Denver Public Library’s downtown branch and focuses on defendants who are unhoused, with the court process aimed at helping them get back on their feet, rather than punitive outcomes like probation or fines.
“We’re still trying to help them, and that is the goal, but, unfortunately, you have to get them in a position where they really have to do it,” Singapuri said.
On bikes, they can spot what officers in cars might miss, riding up to an area quickly and quietly.
Anthony Caproni, 62, saw the officers a beat too late as he drank a 25-ounce can of 8% Natty Daddy at the corner of 16th and Curtis streets at about 3:30 p.m. on a Monday. The officers spotted the drink — and watched as he tried to tuck it out of sight.
They turned their bikes around.
“I know you saw me,” Caproni said as they approached. “You caught me red-handed.”
He set the beer down and gave his information to Riley and Singapuri, who suggested the Denver Outreach Court. Caproni said he’d rather just pay a fine. He rattled off his phone number, sweaty and slurring a bit, then realized it was wrong. He couldn’t quite get the right number out.
He offered to pour the beer into a flowerpot; Singapuri directed him to a trash can across the street.
“This is gonna hurt,” Caproni said, heading to the trash can.
Denver police officers Siena Riley, left, and John Singapuri, right, question Anthony Caproni, center, whom they stopped for having an open container of alcohol wile walking down 16th Street in Denver on May 12, 2025. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)Caproni could not be reached for comment after his citation, but he has a history of alcohol-fueled crimes, The Post found. In 2008, he was charged with sex crimes after he molested a woman, then grabbed her head and feigned oral sex at a condo in Keystone. He was so drunk at the time that officers took him to the hospital before they took him to jail.
And in 2020, he drove a minivan to his former boss’s Denver home and ran over a trash can and 70 feet of fencing. He appeared drunk, the boss told police. He’d fired Caproni three years earlier, but Caproni still thought the boss owed him $400, according to a police report.
Caproni pleaded guilty to felony sex assault and was sentenced to three years in prison in the 2008 case, court records show. In the 2020 incident, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal mischief and received probation.
On the 16th Street Mall, Caproni dismissed officers’ concerns that he might not cooperate with them.
“Over a beer, on a nice sunny afternoon?” he said. “That’s insane.”
Denver police officers John Singapuri, left, and Siena Riley, center, question John Shipman at Skyline Park in downtown Denver on May 13, 2025. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)From the U.S. Army to 16th Street
Fourteen years ago, John Shipman was deployed with the U.S. Army to Afghanistan.
He was a year into what would become a 10-year career, joining the Army as an infantryman in 2010, deploying for 12 months in 2011 and departing the service in 2020 as a sergeant first class. He was a top marksman in his class, his sister, Kelly Shipman, said. He bought a house, was in a committed relationship, had dogs, horses, a brand new truck.
“He had a beautiful life,” she said.
Shipman long struggled with substance abuse and his mental health. He started smoking weed and taking pills as a teenager, and used substances to cope with anxiety and depression after their mother died from cancer in 2009, Kelly Shipman said.
He enlisted in the Army to straighten himself out, and he excelled for a while, she said. He is goofy, a good cook, and a fan of the ocean and bodyboarding. Anywhere he could fish, he did, his sister said.
“He got into the Army and that saved his life,” Kelly Shipman said.
But it also brought challenges: the stress and trauma of a deployment overseas, and a parachute accident during a training exercise that broke his back, he and his sister said.
“They gave him pain pills in the hospital, which is his kryptonite,” she said.
He started using harder drugs, she said, and his stable life unraveled — his relationship ended, his Army career ended. He moved in with an aunt for a while after the Army, tried working in the private sector, but a year ago she kicked him out of their Castle Rock home with a command not to come back until he was clean.
He’s been homeless since, Shipman said just before 9 a.m. on a cloudy Tuesday as Singapuri and Riley wrote him a ticket for possession of drug paraphernalia. They’d rolled up on him and two other men sitting among the sunken sculptures in Skyline Park, tucked just off 16th Street.
Singapuri saw Shipman shove aluminum foil and a blue straw in his pocket as the officers rode their bikes down a set of stairs to reach the group. The other men walked away — the officers hadn’t seen them do anything illegal — but Shipman was cited.
Denver bicycle police officer John Singapuri shows contraband taken away from John Shipman while on patrol around 16th Street in Denver on May 13, 2025. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)He was using fentanyl powder, he said. He thanked the officers for giving him a ticket instead of a ride to jail.
“It’s kind of embarrassing, to be honest,” Shipman said of his situation. He has almost no criminal record in Colorado, court records show, just a previous citation for possessing drug paraphernalia along the Platte River trail in January 2024.
His family is desperate to help him. They lost touch with him and didn’t know he was homeless. Kelly Shipman said her brother sometimes struggles to take accountability for his own actions, and fails to recognize when he needs to seek help.
“You can lead a horse to water; you can’t make them drink it,” Kelly Shipman said. “It just breaks my heart. …It just crumples me to think that he is on the streets. …It’s just devastating. He’s suffering. It’s not like he wants this life. He is in so much pain.”
Struggles with substance abuse and mental health are common in their family, Kelly Shipman said. She herself just finished detoxing from alcohol and has been sober for two months.
“We care about John and love him,” Kelly Shipman said. “And we want to be there. We would help him in a heartbeat. If he wanted to get help, we would help him.”
Denver police officer John Singapuri, right, questions two people in an alley off of 16th Street in downtown Denver on May 13, 2025. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)Trespassing by a dumpster
An hour or so after citing Shipman, Riley and Singapuri cruised up the 16th Street mall on their e-bikes. They swerved down an alley, cornering a man and woman crouched behind a dumpster near 16th and Welton streets, not far from a “No Trespassing” sign.
The alleys abutting 16th Street are closed to pedestrians — an effort to cut down on unhoused people hanging out in them.
The 58-year-old man behind the dumpster came out quietly and sat against the wall of a Target store.
Court records show he’s been charged with crimes seven times since 1999. Of the 14 charges he faced across those seven cases, all but four were dismissed. He’s pleaded guilty three times to possessing a controlled substance and once to attempted robbery, court records show. He could not be reached for comment after his trespassing citation.
The 48-year-old woman with him emerged from behind the dumpster upset, telling officers she was just changing her shirt and loudly protesting when they told her she’d be cited for trespassing. She also protested when a Denver Post photographer took her photo, calling it a violation of her privacy.
Related Articles
16th Street Mall stabbing suspect’s path marked by mental illness, homelessness, drug use Downtown Denver at a crossroads as offices sit empty, buildings go into default and safety concerns persist 16th Street safety is the key to downtown Denver’s rebound Denver will increase police presence downtown, including a mounted horse patrol, to boost safety Denver will spend $1.9 million trying to attract people to 16th Street Mall this summerShe gave a name and a birthdate, and Riley looked her up. The officer studied the photo attached to the name. She was not sure the woman in front of her matched the photo — though it was close.
“What’s your real name?” Riley asked the woman.
“Are you kidding me?” she shouted, apparently outraged. She then repeated the same name, adding a maiden name as well.
Riley wrote the ticket under the name the woman gave. The Post later discovered the woman gave her sister’s name.
She has long struggled with drug addiction and spent years unhoused, said Jeff Connell, her former brother-in-law. For decades, she’s cycled through rehab, months-long bursts of sobriety and relapses, he said. He and her sister adopted the woman’s child as a baby, he said.
She and her sister declined to speak with The Post for this story.
When reached by a reporter, Connell echoed a sentiment that Shipman’s sister had expressed: they’ve been waiting for an unexpected phone call from a stranger about their loved one.
“We’ve known for many, many years, probably 35 years, that we are going to get a phone call any day that it’s gone too far, and it’s over,” Connell said.
Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( What we saw during 8 hours with Denver police on 16th Street mall )
Also on site :