DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Colorado’s auto theft capital gives green light to car thieves.

According to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer, from 1985 until about 2000, Colorado averaged around 1,000 stolen cars per month. Increasing population and recession push that number slowly upward, to briefly touch 2,000 in 2006, before returning to the previous average for another decade.

Then, in 2014, the Colorado legislature, without any dissenting votes, passed a law to tie the level of criminal mischief for car theft to the value of the car stolen, while lowering the overall penalties. The sliding scale of punishment not only encouraged more theft, but it also encouraged thieves to pick on poor and working-class people, stealing cheaper cars to avoid more severe punishment. (This was a double-whammy to those families, coming on the heels of the federal Cash for Clunkers program which removed hundreds of thousands of inexpensive replacement vehicles from circulation.)

And so, unsurprisingly, car theft began to rise again, this time taking only three years to reach 2,000 a month, and prompting newly-elected Governor Jared Polis to declare car theft a major priority for his administration. That worked so well that car thefts doubled again to 4,000 a month from 2020 to 2022, from the combination of loose enforcement and economic restrictions from Covid and the George Floyd/BLM Summer of Love in 2020.

In Denver, reported thefts climbed to nearly 15,000 a year in 2022, or 1,250 a month. That was more than the entire state of Colorado had registered for most of its history.
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Which makes it all the more infuriating that the Denver City Council voted to terminate the Flock camera program at the end of the year, not over legitimate privacy concerns, but in order to protect illegal aliens from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Good and harder, Denver.

Previously: ‘F’ Is for Democrat: Colorado’s Collapse Under One-Party Rule.