It’s admirable if a crime victim can muster a little forgiveness. 

It’s quite another matter if someone who claims to have been carjacked insists, very publicly, that her assailants were in fact the real victims — of some supposedly oppressive “system.”

And if it’s a politician who makes that implausible claim — while sanctimoniously addressing fellow elected officials — it comes across as phony.  As just so much political posturing in an attempt to justify coddling the criminals who prey on society.

The words were uttered by no less than the City Council president of Colorado’s capital city, Amanda Sandoval, captured on video a few weeks ago and posted on Instagram by the muckrakers at dobetterdnvr.

“I’ve been a victim of crime,” Sandoval declares from the council dais. “And I didn’t feel like I was the victim, I felt like the two young boys who carjacked me almost at gunpoint, they were the victims. I was not. They were part of a system.”

One implication, of course, is anyone else victimized by crime isn’t a victim, either. You have to wonder if that applies to the two people shot to death in separate incidents in Denver in recent weeks — both while trying to stop the theft of their cars. 

But her delusions aside, there’s a much more troubling implication — for Colorado’s crime fight. 

Sandoval’s bizarre twist on criminal culpability is shared by other elected policymakers, and not just on the council of our state’s most populous city — which recently slashed sentences for municipal offenses. An entire faction of ruling Democrats at the legislature has enacted law after law displaying the same contempt for real justice, the same obliviousness to right and wrong and the same disregard for crime’s victims. 

The “justice reform” movement’s growing number of adherents in the legislative majority have gone above and beyond the call of duty to lower penalties for violent and property crimes; a bill that actually made it out of the House before running out of time in the state Senate this year would have eliminated first-degree murder for anyone convicted of killing “only” one person.

The self-styled justice reformers decriminalized possession of even the hardest drugs several years ago — without regard to how many pushers would use “possession” as a cover. And the legislature and governor have enacted a number of measures making it harder to keep dangerous criminal suspects in jail while they await proceedings, and speeding release on parole for those already behind bars.

The upshot of going soft on crime should be obvious. But justice reform-minded politicians such as Sandoval, who don’t get it, can check out the groundbreaking research on the subject by Colorado’s Common Sense Institute. It found, among other things, that from December 2019 to December 2021, Colorado’s incarcerated population fell by more than 20% — while the violent crime rate rose by nearly 25%. 

So, if you wonder why it has gotten harder to keep dangerous criminals behind bars in Colorado, or to put them there in the first place, it’s because of politicians like Sandoval.

This week, Sandoval stepped down from the council presidency as her peers elected another member to the post. If only her twisted view of criminal justice could be swept aside as easily.