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In Colorado, Elevated Crime Rates Dampen the Rocky Mountain High Colorado is famous for its abundant beauty, outdoor recreation and legal weed ‒ but its problems with violent and property crime are likely less known. By Trevor Bach | May 9, 2024, at 6:03 a.m. [U.S. News & World Report] Colorado or ‘Crimerado’? More [Visitors walk along the Civic Center Park complex in Denver, Colorado.] Matt Slaby|Luceo for USN&WR Visitors walk along the Civic Center Park complex in Denver, Colorado. The state is No. 47 in the crime and corrections category of the 2024 Best States rankings from U.S. News. On New Year’s Day of 2017, a Colorado state senator named Mike Johnston was in Denver’s Northeast Park Hill neighborhood when he realized thieves had taken off with his blue and orange SUV. “Help!” Johnston tweeted. “My car just got stolen from Office Depot.” Six years later, the Democrat was elected mayor of Denver after running partly on a promise to address th e city’s stolen cars epidemic. In 2022, Denver reportedly ranked among the country’s worst cities for the crime, while Colorado had the highest per capita vehicle theft rate of any state and was notching more than 40,000 car thefts annually. After winning the mayoral race in June, Johnston in January rolled out a new theft prevention strategy that includes a citywide license plate recognition network and beefed up police patrols. The 10 Best States in America [A woman looks at a bird with her daughter at the Newport Fishing Pier in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida on March 8, 2022. (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP) (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)] That came after his car was stolen again in November. “You wouldn’t think it would happen to the mayor,” noted one incredulous local television anchor. “The car crisis now,” added her colleague, “I mean it’s going crazy.” Colorado, perhaps as much as any state in the country, is famous for a high quality of life characterized by an abundance of natural beauty and laid-back attitudes: sweeping Rocky Mountain vistas, world-class skiing and hiking, legal recreational weed. In U.S. News’ 2024 Best States rankings, the Centennial State ranks No. 16 overall and boasts impressive marks for economy (No. 4), education (No. 5), health care (No. 12) and infrastructure (No. 12) READ: Wyoming Jumps in Best States Rankings But the place whose natural beauty famously inspired John Denver to croon about starlight shadows and communion with God also has a darker underside: Although there have been more recent signs of improvement, Colorado has been grappling with high rates of both property crime and violent crime. In this year’s U.S. News ranking s, Colorado places 47th in the crime and corrections category, a conspicuously bad spot for a state with several cities that also rank among the country’s best places to live. “It’s really starting to have an impact,” says Mitch Morrissey, a former district attorney for Denver and a criminal justice fellow at the Common Sense Institute, a free enterprise-focused research group. “There are businesses in the (Denver) metro area that will not service people downtown, because they park their trucks and their people are threatened by homeless people, their tools are stolen out of their truck and oftentimes their cars themselves are stolen. It’s a real problem in some of the cities.” Colorado’s crime wave also belies another fact: In recent history, the state was – at least by some metrics – much safer than the country at large. READ: Why Utah Is the Best State In 1985, the earliest year for which data estimates could be accessed through the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer, Colorado had an overall violent crime rate that was about 16% lower than the national rate, and it remained well below the national mark for decades. Even in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when violent crime across the country soared amid a proliferation of handguns and the crack epidemic, Colorado’s rate s increased but fell well short of national levels. B y 2000, the state’s violent crime rate was about 34% lower than the national mark, estimates indicate, with 3.1 homicides per 100,000 residents compared with a national rate of 5.5 and a robbery rate that was less than half the national rate. Colorado’s property crime rates were less impressive ‒ they trended higher or roughly on par with the national average from the late 1980s through mid-2000s. But by 2007, they also fell below the national rate. Starting in the 2010s, though, the state began to see a dramatic shift: Property crime picked up as the national rate kept falling, surpassing and remaining above the national mark. Colorado violent crime, which began picking up around 2014, surpassed the national rate in 2018, then spiked by 30% from 2019 through 2022 while the national ra te largely plateaued. Data from 2022 indicates Colorado’s crime rates that year exceeded the national rates in multiple property and violent crime subcategories; the state’s car theft rate was nearly three times the national figure. “Are we living in Crimerado?” George Brauchler, another former Denver-area district attorney, wondered in late 2021. Research indicates that the crime wave likely had little relation to the state’s well-known move to legalize the use of recreational marijuana in 2012. Some criminal justice veterans, like Brauchler and Morrissey, place the blame on lenient crime laws and reform-minded efforts ‒ including the use of personal recognizance bonds and the state’s controversial move, in 2020, to end the qualified immunity legal defense for police officers. v> Yet Michael Campbell, a sociology and criminology professor at the University of Denver, points to a mix of other underlying factors that may be at play. One is Colorado’s status as a major interstate transit point, which means the state sees a higher volume of operations like drug trafficking and its related subsidiary crime. Another factor, he says, is the state’s relatively young population: Colorado’s median age of around 37 remains slightly below the national mark. READ: Why Florida Is No. 1 in Education But far more important, Campbell says, is Colorado’s decad eslong economic and urban transformation: Colorado’s Front Range, the part of the state that includes its biggest cities, has been a hotbed for population growth. That boom has effectively made the state more urban, while the affiliated soaring property values have contributed to a dire homelessness crisis and gaping inequality. There are signs of such issues within the Best State rankings, where Colorado placed No. 39 in the opportunity category, which encompasses metrics reflecting economic opportunity, affordability and equality within a state. While Colorado jumped three spots in the category this year, the state struggles in areas including housing affordability (No. 47), cost of living (No. 39) and income gap by race (No. 38). “When you have an influx of people, and for the reasons that we do, there’s a good chance that that is unsettling everybody, and that leads to more crime,” Campbell says. “When peop le lose their homes, when people’s rents go up so much, there’s a lot of stress. You’re going to have more domestic disputes. You’re going to have more homicides.” There are signs of recent progress, however. Last fall, after a yearlong investigation, authorities indicted 13 people accused of operating a theft ring targeting vehicles at Denver International Airport and car dealerships, with the group reportedly linked to 59 stolen vehicles. In 2023 – the year a new law aimed at cracking down on vehicle theft with tougher penalties took effect in July – incidents of the crime decreased in the state compared with 2022. Crimes classified as murders, sex offenses and robberies also fell, according to data from the Colorado Bureau of Investigations. READ: The Best of the Best States Rankings It’s a positive short-term trend, but it also may not be enough to change many residents’ perceptions of a problem that’s gotten out of control. Chris Brown, vice president of policy and research at the Common Sense Institute ‒ a group whose research has found the state’s crime is costing Colorado tens of billions of dollars annually ‒ points out that local business groups have determined public safety is now their members’ top issue. He also notes that in the summer of 2021, his organization decided to study the issue after four or five of its eight team members were personally impacte d. &l dquo;We had an intern who had a catalytic converter nearly sawed off while going to get lunch,” he says. The CEO’s car was broken into, he adds, and another employee walked past a shooting outside a Colorado Rockies baseball game. Campbell, who lives in the neighborhood of South Denver, also remembers drinking too much wine with his wife one night and accidentally leaving the garage door open. The next morning, he discovered that someone had wandered in and stolen a couple thousand dollars’ worth of tools and camping gear. The professor sees a link between such incidents and inequality. “We are definitely seeing more, I think, of people who are going through neighborhoods, walking through blocks, that are pulling on garage doors, pulling on car doors and taking property,” he says. “In the bigger picture, fr om a criminological perspective, you’re going to see an uptick in those things.” [View this email in your browser](:~6Qamo~:~pfmtc~:~79997gsd9999999hsbmofaspgkwnyqehotv01~:~4951~:~lzalmlhzcsarrzaaaaauls~:~1HeAjTZ~:~8575081213887975948793819399qafxks0xnxl8h~:~066/pPhtAg2zx-remo) :~6Qamo~:~pfmtc~:~79997gsd9999999hsbmofaspgkwnyqehotv01~:~4951~:~lzalmlhzcsarrzaaaaauls~:~1HeAjTZ~:~8575081213887975948793819399qafxks0xnxl8h~:~066/pPhtAg2zx-remo :~CD06v~:~bx~:~79997gsd9999999hsbmofaspgkwnyqehotv01~:~0157~:~lzalmlhzcsarrzaaammuca~:~I2sODt5K~:~8575081213887975948793819399qafxks0xnxl8h~:~879/2mkUbDC1PA-remo :~DAO23~:~gyuwjqdo~:~79997gsd9999999hsbmofaspgkwnyqehotv01~:~6492~:~lzalmlhzcsarrzaaaalhzc~:~zKqf67mP~:~8575081213887975948793819399qafxks0xnxl8h~:~825/tTghZdlMv-remo :~BftWy~:~jkls~:~79997gsd9999999hsbmofaspgkwnyqehotv01~:~2952~:~lzalmlhzcsarrzaaamzahm~:~0Py~:~8575081213887975948793819399qafxks0xnxl8h~:~449/ARj4Vkai-remo } } Want to change how you receive these emails? 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