March 9, 2026

Roxy the Denver Police Cat

In 1891, a kitten discovered in a trunk of stolen goods became the unlikely mascot of the Denver Police Department.

In 1891, Denver police opened a trunk of stolen goods recovered from a burglary and found something no one expected: a tiny black kitten sitting inside the evidence.

The kitten’s discovery could easily have ended as a brief curiosity in a police report, but Detective Sam Howe had other ideas. He took the kitten in, named her Roxy, and before long, she had become the official mascot of the entire Denver Police Department.

Roxy moved into the detectives’ office and settled into the rhythms of police work with remarkable ease. Between cases, detectives played fetch with her across the room, and visitors quickly learned that the small black cat was as much a part of headquarters as the desks and filing cabinets.

Local newspapers described Roxy as a lookout and a dependable mouser, but also as a cat who seemed able to tell the difference between officers and civilians, treating the former as colleagues and the latter as suspicious strangers.

She was also extremely spoiled, which the newspapers reported with equal fascination. According to one account, Roxy dined on sirloin steak and drank pints of cream. A journalist covering the police beat once joked that the famous detective Sam Howe did not own the cat at all. The cat, he suggested, owned the detective.

While Roxy supervised the office, Sam Howe developed a habit that would make him a pioneer of criminal recordkeeping. He was frustrated by the department’s lack of organized information, so he began clipping crime stories from local newspapers and carefully filing them into scrapbooks. Every robbery, burglary, and train holdup reported in the press found its way into his growing archive.

Over the years, he compiled 73 indexed volumes of clippings, creating a system historians now consider one of the earliest crime databases in the United States. The scrapbooks documented everything from safecrackers and train robbers to local murders and stolen horses. And scattered among those reports were stories about Roxy.

For a time, the detectives’ office operated under the watchful presence of its feline mascot, who hunted mice, entertained officers, and appeared in the newspapers often enough to become a minor celebrity around the city.

Roxy’s story ended in 1893 in a moment that revealed the same fierce loyalty that had charmed the detectives. After giving birth to a litter of kittens, she defended them from a janitor who had been asked to dispose of the newborns, and the confrontation ended tragically for the little police cat.

The office did not remain catless for long. Another black cat soon appeared at police headquarters, and she came with a name that fit the era’s sense of humor: Satan.

Satan became the next police mascot and reportedly once alerted officers to a fire in the building’s cellar with a series of urgent, panicked meows that sent detectives rushing downstairs.

In Sam Howe’s massive scrapbooks, stories about the two cats appear among reports of robberies, murders, and train thefts. Even detectives, it seems, left room in their records for a cat or two.

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