It was encouraging to see a news report in The Gazette this week about a recent rise in car chases by police in Colorado’s third-largest city. A needed shift in policy by the Aurora City Council last March gave the city’s police more latitude in pursuing suspected car thieves and other lawbreakers. 

It’s part of a laudable crackdown on crime by the city. Among other measures, Aurora has stepped up penalties for auto theft as well as shoplifting.

It all translates to more arrests and, ultimately, more criminals behind bars. Let’s hope other jurisdictions follow suit because, frankly, more arrests are exactly what Colorado could use.

The latest data on the subject from Colorado’s Common Sense Institute makes that clear. An institute report released last week, co-authored by former Denver Police Chief Paul Pazen, found arrests have plummeted in Colorado over the years — as crime has soared.

Incarceration, also has dropped dramatically in our state as has recidivism, i.e., the rate of ex-cons returning to prison after falling back into lives of crime.

Bottom line: Far fewer arrests of lawbreakers; fewer incarcerations; fewer returns to prison for breaking the law again. It’s the handiwork of Colorado’s increasingly soft-on-crime — and out-of-touch— legislature.

In Common Sense’s new report, “The Reform Paradox: How Reduced Incarceration has Coincided with Rising Crime,” the authors note over the past 15 years state lawmakers increasingly “prioritized leniency” in sentencing by lowering sentences for drug offenses and expanding access to parole and probation.

Just look at the hard numbers:

• Colorado’s recidivism rate fell fully 40% between 2008 and 2019.
• From 2008 to 2023, arrest rates dropped 48%.
• From 2014 to 2024, violent crime skyrocketed 55%.
• Just in the two years from December 2019 to December 2021, the number of perpetrators behind bars fell by more than 20% — while the violent crime rate rose by nearly 25%.

The disturbing data shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been watching ruling Democrats at the State Capitol embrace “justice reform” in whittling away at real justice. From one legislative session to the next, the legislature’s offender-friendly political fringe has been decriminalizing violent and property crimes, including auto theft; enacting policies to step up parole, and making it harder to put ex-convicts back behind bars. It’s particularly that crusade to “reduce” recidivism that is the focus of the latest Common Sense report.

As reported by The Gazette, the report’s author’s attributed a lot of the state’s declining recidivism rate — again, in Colorado’s case, that’s a bad thing — to laws passed over the past decade to go easier on parolees. Among the laws was one that requires parole officers to use “intermediate sanctions” like short-term jail stays or placement in treatment programs before revoking parole when an individual has committed a technical violation. Another limits parole revocations for technical violations by requiring non-criminal violations to be addressed with “graduated” sanctions, such as warnings, more frequent drug testing or curfew.

There is a glimmer of hope, as we noted here just last month. The state’s prison population has started to inch up, at least, for now. One reason is more parolees are being sent back for violations of their parole conditions. Let’s hope the trend has some staying power.

Several basic priorities inform our justice system. One is to protect the rights of the accused. Another is to reform and rehabilitate, if possible, the convicted. The top priority, however, is the one Colorado’s political ruling class seems of have abandoned — to protect the law-abiding.