Welcome to jail in the Farms, mook –
don't worry, the gator doesn't bite

Put yourself, if you can, in the head of your average perpetrator, cooling your heels in the lockup in Grosse Pointe Farms. Possibly drunk, certainly unhappy, likely from someplace other than this über-preppy municipality, the Pointiest Pointe of all. You lean back in your cell and look up at the wall. You see not bars, which would make sense, but something far stranger – an alligator. In Top-Siders.

The Farms has had alligators in its jail for almost 20 years. Officer Dottie Deneau put them there.

Seventeen years ago, Deneau painted an alligator in each room in the police lockup.

After all this time, the Public Safety alligator has become part of the scenery. “It’s getting to be a Grosse Pointe thing,” Deneau said. “He’s got boat shoes on and he’s got an ascot with Grosse Pointe Farms on it.”

The cell, with its pink walls and green alligator, pads for sleeping on the floor and toilet in the corner hasn’t proven to break down anyone held there. “If anything, I think it gives them maybe just a little bit of humor in an otherwise sometimes tense situation,” Deneau said.

Perhaps, she said jokingly, the pink and green, which as preppy primary hues constitute the unofficial colors of the Pointes, could be calming to anyone being held there.

The paintings have been there long enough to get a second coat. About five years ago Deneau repainted them. “They were kind of marked up and scratched, so we had touched them up,” she said.

Deneau isn’t an amateur and the alligator isn’t her try at artistry.

“I’m an artist, I’ve painted for years and years, I’ve done art shows and my son is also an artist,” she said.

The alligator has made the cell home for a long but Deputy Director John Hutchins hinted that a new painting might be coming soon. Deneau agrees it has been a long run and it could be time for a change but she isn’t sure what’s next.

“It’s a good possibility," she said. "Perhaps something tropical. It’s not certain yet, it’s still in the works.”
 

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