It’s a recurrent observation that CBS4’s political reporter, Shaun Boyd, is among the best at what she does. Over the last couple of weeks, she has produced a series of startling reports exposing the extent of the problem with criminals in Denver being released on personal recognizance (“PR”) bonds. These are essentially pinkie promises by the accused that if the judge is nice enough to let them go they will, scout’s honor, come back to court at their appointed time to face the music. Occasionally a judge, summoning their inner Torquemada, will set a bond at the punishingly cruel and unusual amount of $1 or $2, but more often a PR bond is set at $0.

Now this might make sense if the crime one is accused of is on the order of, oh say, accumulated parking tickets, or crossing against the light or some such thing, but as Ms. Boyd’s investigations illuminate, this is being applied to people charged with rather more serious crimes, i.e. murder, attempted murder, aggravated assault, sexual assault on a child.

Here, to help establish reference, are a couple of the headlines of Boyd’s stories: “Woman Out On Bond Arrested In Murder Of 80-Year-Old Man”; “Suspect Arrested 3 Times In 24 Hours, Denver Police Officer Begs Judge To Not Release Him”. You get the idea.

And this is not just being done for first offenses either. Many of these, most even, are repeat offenders. The woman who beat the 80-year-old man (George Black is his name), to death while he was sitting on a park bench outside the State Capitol? She was out on a PR bond issued two months earlier, while on probation for assault, a crime she had a long history of committing.

Lest one mistakes this as an isolated anomaly, Boyd reports that an open-records request disclosed that there have been some 4,000 accused felons released on PR bonds in Denver since the beginning of the year. Ms. Boyd did a fantastic job documenting the details of some of these, so I won’t reconstruct them here. You can look her up and watch them for yourself, and should. Make sure your doors and windows are locked.

We don’t know for certain the various judge’s rationales, and as always there are going to be a variety of factors involved. One contributor could be that the District Attorney’s office under the gentle leadership of Beth McCann may be somewhat less than Herculean in pushing for detention or higher bonds.

But in any case, it certainly seems symptomatic of the currently en vogue approach to criminal justice, which directs its sympathy to the first of those two words at the expense of the second. Victims of crime, if acknowledged at all, seem to be considered little more than collateral damage of the culture war. They are by-products of the ideological fetish for equity which encompasses even – especially – the criminal justice realm. The ideological model has no ready or convenient explanation for crime victims, so it largely ignores their existence in service of the grander social transformation it seeks.

And so, we have judges on city court benches steeped in this mindset, buttressed by the pursuit by some lawmakers of criminal justice reform policies that seek to defund (or at least hobble) the police and do away with cash bail and pre-trial detention all together. Pre-trial reform failed at the state legislature last year, due to some courageous votes by sensible Democrats. But, rest assured, it will be back, for few terrible ideas stay buried forever. Even when Colorado’s 50% recidivism rate happens to be the fourth highest in the nation.

That mindset, fortunately, does not appear to appeal to the majority of the public which must live under the pall cast by the policies it spawns. Witness the rejection by Minneapolis voters of that city’s ludicrous proposal to abolish its police department in favor of a nebulous “Public Safety Department” that may have allowed – if really, really necessary – the occasional police officer.

Last Tuesday held an important lesson for Republicans on how to win elections as the emerge from the shadow of Trump. It held a corollary lesson, equally as important, for Democrats, especially those who mistook the wafer-thin Democratic victories in 2020 as a mandate for statist social transformation, rather than mere fatigue with the Trump. Namely that no majority is permanent – in congress, in Virginia, or in Colorado – and failing to come back to reality on issues as grippingly important as keeping murderers and child abusers in jail will sorely test their hold on power.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.