Colorado’s New Year’s resolution to “suck less” when it comes to crime and public safety is on the ropes more quickly than my pledge to work out every day and stop eating loaves of bread.

Two days after Gov. Jared Polis declared in his seventh State of the State address “(in) Colorado, we have zero tolerance for those who commit violent crimes,” a 24-year-old man cut loose by Denver courts to our streets on a PR bond stabbed four innocent people on the 16th Street Mall, killing two of them. Despite serious concerns about his mental illness that previously led him to threaten someone with a knife and unlawful sexual contact on another person, he was sent back to our unsafe streets under a program that needs far more scrutiny.

Under Gov. Polis, as the Common Sense Institute revealed, the vast majority of other states have a better crime climate than we do. We are eighth in the nation in violent crime, fourth in property crime. Whatever decreases in crime Colorado has recently seen are muted compared to the average in the U.S.

With businesses and residents relocating to safer communities and states, our state saw more departures than arrivals and fell more places in the U-Haul Growth Index ranking than any other state in the U.S. Perhaps this is how the Dems will solve the housing supply and affordability issue — create an environment so unappealing and unsafe, fewer folks fight for the housing we have. Genius.

Stay up to speed: Sign up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

The governor also declared in his State of the State: “In the free state of Colorado, we understand what government is, and is not here to do.” Everyone outside of the Gold Dome and the city that hosts it understands government is obligated to keep us safe and protect us from the lawless. It has failed to do so, year after year.

Polis used his annual address to tackle that core reason for government’s existence by highlighting, by name, the three crimes most plaguing Colorado and the metro area: cattle rustling, wage theft and wildlife trafficking. You read that correctly — not retail theft or residential burglary or sexual assault against kids or violent crime or even HUMAN trafficking — just those three.

As important as cattle rustling is to ranchers, is it one of the three crimes most important to Colorado to single out by name with tough talk? Wildlife trafficking?

For a guy who signed on to Attorney General (and gubernatorial aspirant)  Phil Weiser’s legislative efforts to legalize the re-arming of tens of thousands of convicted felons throughout Colorado — drug dealers and car thieves among them — it was odd to hear Polis champion a bill that expanded CBI to seize “illegal guns” — only 62 of them so far. Remember, too, Gov. Polis and the Dem-led legislature made it a crime for a lawful gun owner to fail to go through numerous additional steps to secure their firearm in their already locked car, but refused to increase penalties for those who break into those cars to steal the guns.

Polis: “I will oppose anyone and everyone, and do everything in my power to protect Colorado when it hurts our people and state.” It would be a nice and well-deserved change.

Our legislature was present for Polis’ big speech, but its members appear to have been on TikTok when he pledged “zero tolerance” for violent offenders. Over the next few weeks, the Dems in power will push forward legislation to:

• Eliminate the crime of attempted extreme indifference murder (the Aurora Theater mass murderer was convicted of 70 counts of that very charge);
• Provide immunity from even the juvenile justice system for 10- and 11-year-olds for some crimes;
• Expand the jurisdiction of AG Weiser to go after cops (despite the failure of his hyper-aggressive and ill-advised prosecutions in the Elijah McLain cases);
• Expand ways in which juveniles claiming to be incompetent can avoid accountability;
• Weaken our trial system by eliminating the most law-abiding citizens from our jury pools by allowing those 70-plus to opt out of jury service (Hickenlooper is 72), and,
• Allow those who claim to be insane to avoid criminal culpability to remain on bond on our 16th Street Mall and other venues.

That is just of what we know today. It will likely get worse. For instance, there is an annual bill to address the chronic shortage in judges (as in the 23rd Judicial District) by funding a strategic handful each year. Our General Assembly has so outspent and over-committed its predictable budget during the past few years that bill may die. Fewer judges mean fewer trials mean more fire sales of plea bargains to crime to offset the limited capacity. Fewer judges result in less justice and less public safety. Yet, here we are.

As they have proven each year since I originally took office in 2013, our legislature has set a course to be the most offender friendly in memory.

“In Colorado, good enough is NOT good enough,” Polis proclaimed in his State of the State. Coloradans, especially those in the metro area, would gladly settle for “good enough,” because whatever has happened during the past generation of one-party dominance (guess which party), it cannot legitimately be characterized as “good.”

For Gov. Polis and the progressive legislature, it appears whatever is happening in Denver is good enough for the rest of Colorado.

But as we continue to see in the most recent polls, Colorado has yet to reach bottom where “enough is enough.” Maybe it will in 2025.

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