The spikes and ebbs in Colorado’s violent crime rates have largely mirrored the rest of the U.S. over the past few decades, data recently compiled by the state’s Division of Criminal Justice shows.

Overall violent crime rates in Colorado and nationwide both peaked in the early 1990s before largely trending downward until the 2010s. But violent crime rates in Colorado began to rise again around 2015, according to data compiled by the FBI based on annual reporting from law enforcement agencies.

The recent upward trend has worried law enforcement.

Data about crime trends was the subject of a presentation recently given to the Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice by the Division of Criminal Justice. The presentation covers data on crime numbers, court filings and correctional populations.

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“This isn’t just Denver. This is a statewide problem,” Police Chief Paul Pazen told The Denver Gazette. 

It’s not surprising that Colorado’s general crime rate trends mirror the U.S. as a whole over a few decades, said Brenden Beck, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver.

He said factors that influence crime on a macro level such as unemployment and economic recessions tend to affect different areas at the same time.

He said that makes it difficult for any given local government to respond in a way that changes crime rates.

“It provides both reassurance that Colorado’s not some outlier, but it’s also daunting in that it makes it hard to change crime rates.”

Violent crime incidents recorded by law enforcement include homicides, aggravated assaults, robberies and sexual assaults. Colorado saw its highest violent crime rate in 1992, at 578.8 incidents per 100,000 people. The rates mostly trended downward, with a smaller spike around 2005, before beginning to rise again around 2014 and 2015.

Criminologists generally caution against ascribing changes in crime numbers to any one policy or behavior, since spikes and ebbs in crime are influenced by complex webs of factors.

Jack Reed, the research director in the Division of Criminal Justice who prepared the presentation, said another challenge of understanding changes in data is that crime numbers compiled by law enforcement agencies only reflect incidents that are reported.

So changes in crime trends could reflect more or less willingness to report incidents to police, and not just mean there is more or less crime, he said.

“So for me, that’s always the kind of the difficulty. When I do look at Colorado compared to national trends, it’s hard to know with these changes nationally, are they indicative of actual changes in behavior, or are they indicative of other things like reporting?”

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Colorado has seen a generally upward trend in aggravated assaults – which include shootings and stabbings – since 2016, according to the presentation compiled by the Division of Criminal Justice. The rise is mirrored by a rise in the state and the U.S. as a whole in aggravated assaults involving guns – especially pronounced among juveniles — which stood out to Reed as startling.

“The difference between aggravated assault and homicide is just luck,” he said, though in his interview with The Denver Gazette he didn’t express any policy opinions. “So of all of the data in this report, that’s probably the one piece that’s the most concerning for me.”

He attributed a sharp drop in Colorado’s drug charge filings in district courts since 2019, and a less pronounced drop in criminal filings overall, to a decrease in felony filings because of a law change that reclassified many drug possession charges from felonies to misdemeanors.

In 2019, Colorado’s drug charge filings in district court were at the highest point since 2012, with 17,618 cases. But that number dropped to 5,201 in 2021, according to the presentation.

“It was really felony drug filings that was driving the overall increase in district court filings. … And so really, the felony filing increase was driven by drugs, and the decrease was driven by drugs,” Reed said.

Beck said he’s encouraged by trends in property crimes rates, which in Colorado have stayed mostly flat since around 2007 and generally gone down nationwide since the mid-1980s, a contrast to other types of crime trends.

“There are some signs for hope in the data as well.”