Post Premium: Our best stories for the week of Feb. 10-16

Getting your player ready...

It is not easy figuring a city’s crime rate or even determining an exact number of how many people were killed in a given year.

The Denver Post has tracked homicides in the city since 2015, and every year I’m baffled at how tricky it can be. We keep a list throughout the year based on our reporting and information from police. Then at the year’s conclusion, we also request homicide data from the Denver Police Department and the medical examiner.

The lists never match.

So we begin double-checking to find the exact number. It usually takes about a month to sort out, build our complete database and analyze the information so we can inform readers on an important public safety issue. I could go on about the complexity of crime data, but I don’t want to bore you.

The bottom line is this: Denver’s homicide numbers steadily have increased over a five-year period, and city leaders don’t have a good answer as to why. And what��ap even more disturbing is the increasing number of young people shooting each other and dying in our city. This is not an easy subject to read about, but we hope it is informative and a call to action to help our young people.

Thanks for reading.

— Noelle Phillips, Denver Post breaking news editor

Killings among Denver’s teens continue, even as city and community leaders try new solutions

Candles and portraits of Aiden Lawrence, ... — Timothy Nwachukwu, Special to the Denver Post
Candles and portraits of Aiden Lawrence, 14, are seen during a candlelight vigil held in his name on Aug. 13, 2019 in Denver. Lawrence was fatally shot on around 2:30 a.m. on August 9 near East 54th Avenue and North Xenia Street according to Denver Police officials.

NEW AND RELATED:

📰 Not a subscriber yet?

Five of The Denver Post’s best stories this week

Colorado’s housing crunch reaches beyond Front Range, as mountain and plains communities struggle to provide affordable options

A man walks his dog in ... — Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post
A man walks his dog in The Commons at Two Rivers, a new housing development, in Salida on Feb. 11, 2020. Affordable housing has become a problem in Chaffee County, where the cost of homes is skyrocketing but wages and seasonal work make it hard for people to afford to buy homes. The Commons at Two Rivers is a mixed use development where 12% of the new housing units are affordable.

The chronic housing shortages that have put intense pressure on metro Denver residents and clamped down on workers in the state’s resort towns in recent years are being felt in distinct and stubborn ways in small Colorado towns from Poncha Springs to Julesburg, Joe Rubino reports.

Colorado has both a caucus and a primary next month; here’s how they will work

Peter Wright holds an American flag above hundreds of people who were forced to organize in a parking lot during a Democratic presidential caucuses at East High school in Denver. — Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post
Peter Wright holds an American flag above hundreds of people who organized in a parking lot during a Democratic presidential caucuses at East High school in Denver on March 1, 2016.

Democratic and GOP caucus meetings are set to take place across Colorado on March 7, but the process will be much different than in Iowa, where it took days to sort out the results on the Democratic side. For one thing, caucus-goers here won’t be choosing presidential nominees. Registered voters will do that via ballots that are already being sent out, Saja Hindi reports.

Developers of Colorado’s metro districts approve the property taxes that homeowners are supposed to pay, but don’t necessarily pay those taxes themselves on land they own in the district, a Denver Post review of delinquent taxes found. Read more in this continuation of our Debt & Democracy investigation from David Migoya.

Photo of the week

Denver Post file

Kurt Melle, 31, is not only a ballet artist, he's also a guitar player and a chef at Antonia's in Keystone. This shot was taken at the end of spring skiing in 1987 at Arapahoe Basin.

��ap