Author: Michael Hancock
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When improvement isn’t enough | Michael A. Hancock
At a recent Aurora Public Safety Committee meeting, Police Chief Todd Chamberlain did something that has become surprisingly rare in civic life: he presented operational reform backed by measurable results. For the past 18 months, the Aurora Police Department has implemented targeted crime-reduction strategies – focusing patrol resources where crime density and call volume demanded…
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Aurora needs adults, not symbolism | Michael Hancock
Aurora is not short on real problems. We have a public-safety imperative: keep crime trending down and keep it down. We have a humanitarian imperative: move the homeless off sidewalks and into services that restore people to stability, treatment and work — something resembling normal life. We have an economic imperative: expand attainable housing —…
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A credibility crisis for Aurora’s public safety chair
Aurora didn’t just elect Rob Andrews to City Council. The new majority elevated him into one of the city’s consequential roles: chair of the Public Safety, Courts and Civil Service Policy Committee. That title is not ceremonial. It signals oversight, judgment, and moral authority in the lane where public confidence either holds — or collapses.…
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A theater of the absurd at Aurora City Hall
What unfolded at Monday night’s meeting of the Aurora City Council was not governance. It was performance. Carefully staged, morally theatrical, and intellectually thin. A civic chamber meant for deliberation became a stage, and a resolution presented as public business functioned instead as a prop in a familiar drama: America as villain, crisis as currency,…
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Aurora’s new progressives rewrite reality | Michael A. Hancock
Progressive politics rarely arrives announcing itself as ideology. It arrives as emergency, not to solve a problem, but to justify a savior. The language is familiar: equity, justice, compassion, fairness. The tone is moral. The urgency is absolute. And the message is always the same — this city is broken, its institutions are corrupt, and…
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Aurora — a city still becoming | Michael A. Hancock
Christmas is not a holiday for illusions. It does not ask us to pretend the world — or our city — is whole, harmonious, or complete. It asks something more complicated: that we acknowledge what is broken without surrendering to it, and that we understand renewal as a responsibility rather than a feeling. As this…
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COLUMN: Turning Aurora’s strength into jobs, growth
Ask a typical voter what “economic development” means and you’ll often get the same answer: a vague sense of backroom deals, developers in suits, and politicians cutting ribbons in front of buildings most residents will never walk into. It’s easy, in that fog, to assume the winners are always the “big guys” and the losers…
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Will counterfeit compassion destroy Aurora? | Michael A. Hancock
There is a particular kind of civic ruin that arrives not by malice but by moral confusion. It comes dressed in benevolence, cloaked in the language of empathy, and sold as “the right thing to do.” It flatters our instincts and numbs our judgment. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, it hollows out the very foundations of…
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COLUMN: Aurora aims to transform dependency into dignity
Shantelle Anderson, who once slept under stairwells, is now in a major leadership role in one of Colorado’s boldest homelessness initiatives. That’s not a feel-good story. It’s a strategic imperative. On Monday, Nov. 17 in Aurora, the Regional Navigation Campus will open — a 600-bed facility that goes well beyond the old shelter paradigm. Most…
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Aurora’s water policy could redefine the West | Michael A. Hancock
Turn the tap in Aurora and water flows. Most residents never think about what it takes to make that happen. But behind that simple act, Aurora has been quietly rewriting one of the oldest — and most contentious — stories in the West: the fight between cities and farms over water. For decades, Colorado’s cities…