Ever since state government fell under one-party rule, Colorado has become a dramatically and demonstrably less safe place to raise a family, start a business, or just live. That is not hyperbole or conjecture. Based on the U.S. News and World Report analysis of the latest Federal Bureau of Investigation data, Colorado’s safety standing relative to all other states has plummeted.

In 2022, as Gov. Jared Polis sought election to a second term, he used his State of the State speech to address for the very first time in such a speech the issue of public safety. Reminiscent of (but much less ambitious than) President John F. Kennedy’s speech pledging to land an American on the moon, Polis declared, “I want to spend the next five years making Colorado one of the top-10 safest states in the country.” At about the halfway point in Polis’s pledge, we are closer to the center of earth than we are the moon. We are headed in the wrong direction. Polis’s moon-shot for public safety — thus far — has been a failure.

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Polis’s State of the State pledge this past January that “we all deserve to be safe” appears to be a statement of fact, rather than an aspiration or commitment. Coloradans deserve to be safe, but we are not going to get it. Not under the current leadership.

Just last week, Polis posted a webpage boldly and misleadingly titled “Promises Made, Results Delivered.” At the very bottom of that page is his restatement he “is committed to making Colorado one of the top ten safest states through data-driven investments.” It appears that the governor’s data is drunk and his “investments” are driving Colorado into a head-on collision with reality.

The U.S. News and World Report survey of safest states in America came to some disturbing — but not unexpected — conclusions. Colorado is one of the least-safe states in the entire country.

Only Washington state — which has recently begun the about-face from their failed policies to treat theft like jaywalking — ranks higher in property crimes than our state. Under Polis and the Democrats’ leadership (total control of state government since 2019), Colorado is now ranked safer than only New Mexico and Louisiana. OMG. That means California (42), New York (30) and Illinois (19) are all statistically safer than the Centennial State. FWIW, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida is 15.

For violent crime, the ranking is equally disturbing: 44th — near the bottom.

For the overarching crime and corrections category, Colorado is fourth-worst in the nation. The 2018 and 2019 rankings had Colorado at 29. For those who attribute our crime woes to the government’s response to the 2021 pandemic, the data says otherwise. According to a study by the Common Sense Institute, among all states — Colorado had the highest increase in its property crime rate between 2011 and 2020. That same year, our violent crime rate was 35% higher than 2011. Nationally, the rate grew only 3%. So, it was not COVID-19. The year 2012 was the last Republicans controlled the state House.

Crime in Colorado has gotten worse since the election of 2018, which ushered in unprecedented Democrat control of every aspect of state government, from both houses of the legislature to attorney general to governor.

According to the USNWR study, in our region, with the singular exception of Escape from New Mexico, no state that borders Colorado is within 10 ranking spots of us. Whatever we have been doing is not working; it is making things worse. What about an approach that embraces more freedom, instead of less? Wyoming, the border state where you can go to buy fireworks, extended-capacity magazines and other items treated as contraband in Colorado, is ranked the 11th-safest state. Meanwhile, marijuana remains illegal up there. Weird, huh?

However, Colorado is in the top 10 of one big category: drug overdose deaths. The Centers for Disease Control reports nearly 2,000 Coloradans died from drug overdoses, statistically likely to have involved fentanyl, despite a downturn nationally.

Enter the Democrat-run legislature to address our disastrous public safety ranking. Instead, taking their lead from none but California, our lawmakers again advanced the cause of offenders over victims and the law-abiding.

Until now, defendants who were deemed incompetent (completely different than insanity), were restored to competency to be held accountable for the crimes they committed while sane. HB-1355 creates a vehicle where those defendants are returned to our streets and the charges against them — including breaking into your business or your car, or trespassing an Auraria school building — get their charges dismissed within 182 days whether they are restored to competency or not.

A bill to criminalize your failure to lock up your gun in your already locked car passed, but a bill to enhance penalties for those who break into your car to steal your gun was defeated. A bill to protect “sensitive spaces” from law-abiding gun owners will now leave those spaces vulnerable to armed criminals.

A bill to felonize any amount of the most lethal poison we have seen on the streets thus far — fentanyl — was also scuttled by the Dems. Maybe top-10 overdose deaths is not good enough?

The bottom line is this: elections have consequences. What will Colorado become after this November?

George Brauchler is the former district attorney for the 18th Judicial District and is a candidate for district attorney in the newly created 23rd Judicial District. He has served as an Owens Early Criminal Justice Fellow at the Common Sense Institute. Follow him on Twitter(X): @GeorgeBrauchler.