Homicides in Denver decreased in 2022 after two years of increases. But December saw more than the average for the year, and teenage victims and suspects continue to worry officials.

Denver police counted 88 homicides last year, down from 96 in 2021. Nine were tallied in December.

“It’s not a number that we’re happy with, unfortunately,” said Chief Ron Thomas, adding each life lost is one too many.

Eight victims in 2022 were under 18, and eight of the year’s homicides had juvenile suspects charged criminally.

Thomas said the department hopes to bring those numbers down with focus on social services for families and economic development. Reducing homicides by underage offenders also requires measures that reduces the chances of them getting their hands on guns, such as gun locks, not storing them in cars and buyback drives – in which the city pays people to turn over guns voluntarily.

Thomas estimated the city collected about 1,000 guns from its buyback events last year.

“So that’s 1,000 guns that will not fall into the wrong hands and have some tragic results from someone using that firearm,” he said.

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The numbers mirror a concern about juvenile violence statewide. In the 2022 fiscal year, 43% of kids committed to the juvenile system had committed a violent offense, up from 31% in the 2019 fiscal year, according to an annual report from the Division of Youth Services.

Denver’s trend in homicides from 2019 to 2022 also appears to mirror what mid-size and large cities in the U.S. saw, based on an analysis of 27 cities by the Council on Criminal Justice think tank.

Homicides rose by 37% from 2019 to 2020 in the cities studies, resulting in 1,472 more deaths. Homicides increased 2% between 2020 and 2021, but then declined by 4% in 2022.

However, some of the cities saw much larger increases than others, and some experienced decreases while homicides rose elsewhere. The study included Denver, and analyzed cities ranging from a population of about 227,000 (Richmond, Virginia) to 8.4 million (New York City).

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Personal disputes continued to be a top motivation for homicides in 2022, following 2020 and 2021, a spokesperson said of the department’s internal analysis. Denver police counted 25 homicides last year with a personal dispute as the main driver, said Matt Clark, commander of the department’s Major Crimes Division.

He said the department tends to classify each homicide in only one category when determining causes.

“You’ll see crossover. When we look at the drug-nexus cases, those cases sometimes are robberies as well, but it was a drug transaction. So those are going to fall into a drug-nexus type scenario there.”

Domestic violence and drugs followed personal disputes followed as top causes for homicide, according to police.

But tracking of homicides includes some differences depending on the source. While the Office of the Medical Examiner, for the most part, includes any person killed by another under one count, some sources of data on Denver’s homicides separate out certain deaths that meet the definition.

The police department’s internal tracking of homicides and online data dashboard does not include deaths at the hands of officers, though the number reported to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation does include fatal officer shootings.

The department tracks deaths this way according to the FBI’s guidelines for reporting under its Uniform Crime Reporting program, Clark said.

The medical examiner recorded 90 homicides last year, compared with 104 last year and 102 in 2020.

The police department counts homicides for the year in which the act was committed, Clark said. For example, someone shot at the end of 2021 who passes away in the hospital in 2022 would be counted in 2021.

The medical examiner counts homicides for the year in which the person died, the office’s operations manager said.

The medical examiner and Denver police also track traffic fatalities separately. A spreadsheet provided to the Denver Gazette by the police department shows the department recorded 82 traffic fatalities for 2022. The tracking includes deaths that led to criminal charges such as vehicular homicide or felony hit-and-run.

Clark said the medical examiner classifies the manner of unintentional traffic deaths as accidental.

But different ways of accounting homicides can be confusing for the public, said Jacob Kang-Brown, a senior research fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice, especially if that means the numbers vary based on the source.

“Public safety and violence prevention are a really important part of our world. And tracking homicide, and better understanding how that happens, I think is a valuable thing. And so making sure that the data actually represent what’s happening is important,” he said.

Thomas also stands by the police department’s strategy of focusing policing resources on several “hot spots” in the city that they say have been the locations of a disproportionate share of shootings and homicides. Currently the police department has eight intersections in the city pinpointed as focus areas.

The strategy has drawn criticism that it leads to over-policing of poor communities and people of color. But following a shooting last fall in Denver’s East Colfax neighborhood that injured six people, just over the border with Aurora, the Denver Gazette also spoke to a resident who said she felt like she typically would only see police visible in her neighborhood immediately after a major violent incident.

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“I’m hopeful that if we were to ask her today that she would have a different response; that she would say that she continues to see police officers in her neighborhood, even though we’re a long ways away from those tragic events that occurred back at the end of last year,” Thomas said.

“I think that there was sort of a sentiment that the city government as a whole had really kind of neglected that neighborhood. Hopefully I was able to convince that neighborhood that, actually, there’s a significant amount of government intervention and support that has been infused into this particular neighborhood.”