As much of Colorado reels from an epic crime wave, Aurora has been taking the first steps toward restoring public safety. It has been setting an example for the rest of the Denver metro area as well as the state.

It began with voters in Colorado’s No. 3 city electing a new City Council majority last fall. The new council promised a back-to-basics agenda — a refreshing turn away from the previous council’s naive and fruitless fixation with social justice and other vague causes. Central to the new basics was fighting crime.

The newly elected majority aimed not only to make public safety a top priority once again but also to bolster the city’s police force toward that end. In part, that meant opting out of the misguided crusade against cops that had swept the nation in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020.

It also meant reassessing Aurora’s own police department. City Manager Jim Twombly fired Chief Vanessa Wilson in April, citing issues with her overall leadership and management. A recent audit of police records had uncovered a huge backlog of pending crime reports. Meanwhile, results of exit interviews of departing Aurora officers — the records were obtained by Denver’s Fox31 — revealed Wilson’s unpopularity among rank-and-file cops in the trenches.

Most recently, as reported by The Gazette, the council voted 7-3 this week to impose mandatory minimum sentences for motor-vehicle theft. It’s the first attempt in the state to stem soaring auto thefts that have made Colorado the stolen-car capital of the country. Auto thefts in fact have skyrocketed 88% since 2017 across Colorado and have leapt by an astounding 239% in Aurora.

The new law was championed by a member of the Aurora council’s new tough-on-crime majority, at-large member Dustin Zvonek. He recently observed to Denver’s News7, “In Colorado, over the past six, seven years, we’ve seen a systematic effort to decriminalize everything to the point to where we’re decriminalizing crime.” Amen.

A crackdown is overdue.

But try telling that to the soft-on-crime holdouts in elected office who unfathomably insist that coddling criminals will tame the crime wave.

As The Gazette also reported, council member Juan Marcano, who voted against the tougher penalties, wanted instead to address the underlying social and economic factors that motivate people to steal cars. He weighed in with some well-worn bromides from the 1960s.

“We have more people in this country — the land of the free — than any other country in the world in jail, and we are not any safer for it,” Marcano protested.

Actually, just the opposite seems to be the case in Colorado. The state’s surging crime has been accompanied by a years-long decline in the number of lawbreakers behind bars, as revealed in a groundbreaking study released last year by Colorado’s Common Sense Institute. Plausibly, it has been a reluctance to jail wrongdoers — not social and economic factors — that has fueled the crime wave.

All Coloradans would welcome an end to poverty and related social ills. But most people of modest means, like most people in general, are law-abiding citizens. Which is why putting bad guys in jail where they can’t harm the rest of us is far likelier to curb criminal behavior.

Denver Gazette editorial board