This story by Chase Woodruff appeared on Colorado Newsline on September 11, 2023. We are sharing it in two parts.
In the opening days of Colorado’s 2023 legislative session, a bipartisan group of state lawmakers, mayors and law enforcement officials stood in the halls of the Capitol and unveiled what they said was the solution to a statewide spike in motor vehicle thefts.
Senate Bill 23-97 increased penalties for repeat offenders and re-felonized thefts of motor vehicles valued at under $2,000, reversing a change made in a 2021 criminal justice reform law. It came with the backing of Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat who had successfully pressed the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice to recommend more punitive sentencing guidelines.
In the wake of a heated 2022 campaign season full of talk from Colorado Republicans about the state’s “crime tsunami,” the bill was passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate. State Sen. Bob Gardner, a Colorado Springs Republican and the bill’s sponsor, called it a “good start in the right direction” as “crime continues to climb in Colorado, especially auto theft.”
In fact, after peaking in the spring of 2022, rates of car theft had fallen nearly 20% in the nine months leading up to SB 23-97’s introduction, according to data reported by law enforcement agencies to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. They continued to decline steadily throughout the first half of 2023, before the law went into effect on July 1.
The decline is part of a broader trend over the last year: Though little notice has been taken by leading political figures and the media, Colorado’s reported crime rates appear to have peaked in 2022, and are now trending downward again.
Through the first six months of 2023, Colorado was on pace to record its lowest number of homicides since 2019, according to a Newsline analysis of CBI data. Rates of violent crime and property crime, two key aggregate metrics reported by Colorado law enforcement to state and federal databases, saw year-over-year declines during the same period. More recent data published by police departments in Colorado’s three largest cities — Denver, Colorado Springs and Aurora — show those trends continuing through July and August.
Mirroring national trends, reported crime levels in Colorado remain elevated above the near-historic lows recorded in the 2010s. But as in most states around the country, crime rates in its largest cities have entered a slow but steady decline after the increase that began in 2020 — a wave that criminologists attribute in large part to the unprecedented social and economic disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We saw all these stressors that happened during COVID, especially economic ones, that are leading to other forms of health problems, such as drug abuse and alcohol abuse,” said Lisa Pasko, chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Denver. “Now we (have) not just a typical police response — although we do have that more now than we did before — but we see our services coming back, we see youth intervention efforts coming back. All of that was on pause.”
With a new legislative session and a high-stakes election looming in 2024, the political furor over crime shows no signs of abating. But advocates for criminal justice reform say the reversal of the post-2020 trend is all the more reason for police, prosecutors and lawmakers not to revert to more punitive policies. The newly increased penalties for auto theft, they say, are a prime example of ignoring the underlying causes of crime for the sake of political expediency.
“That is so common,” said Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition. “You can see that time and time again, that by the time a legislature reacts — and that’s all it is, it’s just a reaction — to what is perceived to be a spike in crime, the trend changes.”
Following a well-established seasonal pattern, crime rates in large Colorado cities rose this summer, but didn’t spike as high as they have in recent years.
In Denver, about 20% fewer motor vehicle thefts have been reported through September 5 than at the same point last year, according to Denver Police Department data. It’s a decrease that Denver Police Department chief Ron Thomas attributes both to more dedicated local enforcement and better community engagement.
”What has been helpful for us in Denver is continued education on how to keep the car safe — constant messaging from our officers to the community,” Thomas said in an interview. “We’ve also identified hot spots that our officers can focus on, and we stood up our own dedicated auto theft team to focus on those hot spots.”
Denver and other Colorado cities experienced some of the highest rates of auto theft in the country in 2021 and 2022, according to FBI data. Pandemic disruptions led to more opportunities for theft and an increase in “motivated offenders,” Pasko said, in a state that has “a lot of the cars that people want,” like pickup trucks and SUVs. Car theft, in turn, helps drive up rates of other kinds of crime through so-called secondary offenses.
“Those three things combined to create (higher) crime rates, and then you see an increase in things like automobile or other forms of property theft, and sometimes that will come with the use of a firearm,” Pasko said.
In 2023, auto thefts in Aurora are also down 26% year-over-year, according to Aurora Police Department data. Colorado Springs is an exception to the statewide trend; reported rates of car theft there are up roughly 20% in 2023, though they remain lower than Aurora and Denver on a per-capita basis.
To Donner, the Legislature’s move to increase penalties was a classic case of “soundbite policy.” Opponents of the bill questioned whether changes to Colorado’s sentencing statutes would be an effective deterrent to potential car thieves.
“Can you tell me the difference between motor vehicle theft penalties before and after, without having to consult a source?” she said. “I can’t do it, and it’s my job to know it, too — I’d have to go to a source.”
“You’re not actually solving anything when you don’t understand the context, you’re not going to the root, and you’re not even relying on data and best-practice research to help guide you,” Donner added.
Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty championed SB-97’s passage at the Legislature. While he says that trends in auto theft and other crimes are driven by “a number of different factors,” he believes that harsher punishments were one part of the solution.
“When we see a spike in crime of such a significant nature that it rockets us to No. 1 in the nation, I think we have to take a hard look at the systems that currently exist, and figure out what we could do to improve those systems to address what was quickly becoming a crisis for Colorado,” Dougherty said. “So looking at the sentencing structure, I think was certainly a necessary and appropriate step.”
“The argument that people aren’t going to consider the penalty when they’re committing a crime — I’m not sure I agree with that,” Dougherty added. “The emphasis that a society and a culture places on conduct and unacceptable conduct, I do think that has an impact on people over the long term.”
Statewide, reports of motor vehicle theft peaked at a monthly total of 4,336 in March 2022. Through the first half of this year, they were on pace to decline by roughly 25%. That’s despite the fact that auto theft is on the rise in most other parts of the country — the one exception to the downward national trend in crime rates this year, the nonprofit Council on Criminal Justice reported in July.
SB-97 went into effect on July 1, giving prosecutors and judges leeway to levy harsher sentences on people convicted of stealing cars worth less than $2,000 — a threshold that applies to roughly 1 in 12 stolen cars — and to people convicted of multiple car thefts.
In general, criminologists say there’s little evidence that harsher punishments serve to effectively deter crime.
“Only the true career criminals know how to manipulate the system,” said Pasko. “The majority of people have no clue what’s going to happen to them.”
Pasko said there’s more evidence that increased police presence, and other forms of deterrence, can help bring crime rates down.
“A lot of times, the cost-benefit analysis is, ‘Am I going to get caught?’ That’s really the big question,” she said. “So if you increase policing and patrol, increase supervision, then you increase the belief that you might get caught.”
“Are we in the throes of a new Summer of Violence?”
That was the question posed by a town hall on youth violence hosted by the Denver Gazette and 9News last month, referring to the name given by local media to Denver’s infamous summer of 1993.
In fact, the summer of 2023 is similar to the “Summer of Violence” in one respect: Homicides and other violent crimes are down, just like they were in 1993, when — despite an 80% year-over-year increase in newspaper headlines about the violence — Denver’s homicide and violent crime rates fell slightly compared to 1992.
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