The FBI confirmed today what many local cops have known for sometime: crime is down in Colorado, as it is across the country.
Revised figures show Colorado had 120 homicides in 2010, which represented an almost 32 percent decline from 2009 and the lowest one-year total since 1969, according to the FBI’s annual “Crime in the United States” report.
Nationally, homicides were down 4.2 percent, according to the report.
All violent crimes in Colorado — murder, armed assaults, rapes, robberies and non-negligent manslaughter — were down 5 percent in 2010 over the previous year. Nationally, the decline was 6 percent.
Property crimes such as burglary, larceny, car thefts and arson fell 2.7 percent in Colorado and 6.5 percent nationally.
While law enforcement leaders said it’s faulty to read too much into one year’s decrease, they noted the state’s steady decline in crime over 16 years.
“We’re not fooling ourselves: numbers that go down can and will come back up,” said Sonny Jackson, a spokesman for Denver police, which saw a 10-year low of just 27 homicides in 2010.
The department has already 35 this year, he said.
Lance Clem, spokesman for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which collects the data for the FBI from local agencies, partially credited modern approaches to law enforcement.
“Part of it is definitely smarter policing,” he said. “But it’s really a combination of things, and, in some years, you get lucky and have fewer crimes.”
Clem said criminals are emboldened to commit larger crimes when they see smaller ones — broken windows, graffiti, prostitution and street-level drug dealing — left alone. Fighting those crimes have proven to stem larger ones, he said.
Community policing, where beat cops work with neighborhood leaders and groups, also takes a bite out of crime, Clem said.
Denver Police Lt. Matt Murray said Chief Gerald Whitman did not have a community policing unit, as most departments have, but instructed every officer to be engaged in the communities they serve.
“Do recreation centers play a role in preventing crime? I would say they do,” Murray said. “Now, as grant dollars start to dry up and the economy continues to decline, and those recreation centers start to close, we’ll see if that causes numbers to creep back up.”
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com
