Gov. Polis assured all in his State of the State address that Colorado’s crime rates ranked neither too high nor too low, but comfortably in the middle — so everyone just shut up about it.
Turns out Polis wasn’t telling us the truth.
The Denver Gazette fact-checked Polis’s claim that Colorado falls in “the middle of the pack on crime rates,” and discovered that Colorado’s crime rate is higher than the national average.
According to the FBI, only Washington, D.C. had a higher property crime estimate than Colorado.
We are #2.
The story goes on to report on violent crime numbers:
The FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) estimates the total violent crime rate for Colorado at 481 per 100,000 residents in 2021.
In contrast, NIBRS estimated the violent crime rate for the U.S. at 395.7 per 100,000 people in the same year, which means, using this database alone, Colorado’s crime rate is higher than the national average.
So that’s awkward, for Polis, who has yet to apologize for misleading everyone.
With a straight face, Polis pledged in his speech to make Colorado one of the safest states in the nation if we just give him another three years when he’s up for reelection.
“Every person deserves a safe home and a safe community, and in three years I want Colorado to be closing in on our goal of becoming one of the top ten safest states,” he said. “Right now, Colorado falls in the middle of the pack on crime rates, but that’s not good enough.”
In other words, it took Polis 1,460 days to make Colorado the runner-up for the title of Property Crime Capitol of the Country.
But if we give him another 1,095 days, he pledges to completely reverse his crime trend and make us one of the 10 safest states in the nation.
That promise in itself is a crime. It’s called fraud.