The weekend before Christmas, as revelers finished wrapping gifts or prepared to visit loved ones, four people were stabbed or shot to death over two days in Denver — the final homicide victims of the deadliest year in the city’s recent history.

Sixty-seven people died by homicide in Denver in 2018, the highest number recorded since 2004 and the fourth year in a row that the number of killings in the city has remained level or climbed, data compiled by Denver police, the Denver Office of the Medical Examiner and The Denver Post show.

The number of homicides per capita — 9.5 per 100,000 people — also reached its highest point since 2005, though Denver’s homicide rate remains nowhere near those seen in the country’s most deadly cities.

Denver’s rising homicide rate bucks the trend seen in many other large cities in the U.S., according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. Nineteen of the country’s 30 largest cities were expected to see murder rates decline, according to the center’s report.

The downtown Five Points neighborhood and Central Business District both saw an uptick in the number of homicides in 2018. Six people were killed in Five Points, where the number of killings have risen every year since 2015. Four people were stabbed or beaten to death in the Central Business District, though the neighborhood had only one homicide total in the previous three years combined.

On one Sunday in November, a 66-year-old man experiencing homelessness was beaten and killed while standing on Lawrence Street in Five Points in the middle of the day.

One day later and two blocks north, an innocent bystander was shot and killed in broad daylight in a gun battle between two gangs near 21st and Lawrence streets, just one block from the popular strip of bars on Larimer Street next to Coors Field. Three other bystanders and a suspected gang member also were injured. Others nearby — biking home from work or eating tacos on a work break— took cover as bullets flew.

The killings prompted promises from Denver police Chief Paul Pazen to deal with concerns about crime in the downtown neighborhood. Mayor Michael Hancock issued a statement and said the shooting “and other recent tragedies in the neighborhood are unacceptable.”

A sense of unease in Five Points

Dan De La Torre’s family has owned and operated the La Popular bakery and tamale shop in Five Points for the past 73 years. He was raised on Larimer Street, he said, but the violence the area has seen in the last year has made him nervous. The biggest nuisance used to be mostly harmless drunk people, he said, but the crowd seems to have changed to more hardened criminals and drug users.

“I’m on my guard when I walk in the door,” he said.





Peter Holben co-owns Circus Collective, the yoga and aerial arts studio next door, and said the recent violence and other crimes have made it hard to attract and retain clients. He chose the location almost two years ago because it was central, within budget and available in a tight real estate market, but has found the location hasn’t helped his business grow.

His clients, many of whom are female, sometimes feel unsafe walking back to their cars at night after class, he said. Staff and students have had bikes and phones stolen.

“A lot of people just feel uncomfortable in the area,” Holben said.

But Jake Romero, who manages several bars on Larimer Street, said he hasn’t noticed any change in business and still feels safe. He noted that Denver police held a meeting with the neighborhood’s business owners last month to discuss crime.

Both Romero and De La Torre attended the meeting and both said they’ve noticed more officers in the area and appreciated the department’s efforts.

“I feel like they’ve been listening to us,” Romero said.

Representatives from the Denver Police Department, the Denver District Attorney’s Office and Denver’s Department of Public Safety all declined to comment on the homicide numbers until they can complete their own reviews of the data.

“Any increase in crime, especially in violent crime, is concerning,” the Denver Police Department said in a statement. “One of our goals as a police department is to not just address the ‘what’ and ‘who’ of criminal activity, but to learn as much as possible about the ‘why’ so that we can enhance our prevention efforts. Our analysis of homicides and other crime data throughout the year has led to several new initiatives that the department is announcing in 2019 with the goal of improving safety for our community.”

Last year, Denver police could not find any specific pattern among the city’s 56 deaths, according to previous Denver Post reporting. In 2016, a spate of domestic violence homicides drove the number to 56. The year before, police attributed almost half of the 50 killings to ongoing gang violence.

National perspective

Denver’s homicide rate places it exactly in the middle of the country’s 30 largest cities, between Las Vegas and Oklahoma City.





Though 2018 was a record year in recent history, the city’s rate of 9.5 homicides per 100,000 people is nowhere near the numbers seen in the 1990s or in the country’s most violent cities last year. Denver’s rate peaked at 19.2 in 1992 before tumbling dramatically until 2000. Baltimore and Detroit, the most deadly cities, had respective rates of 51.7 and 39.6 in 2018, according to estimates from the Brennan Center for Justice.

That change fits the trend seen by many cities across the country, which saw record numbers of killings in the 1990s before continuous declines, said Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. Changing police practices, more law enforcement personnel and improving economic situations all helped contribute to that decline, he said.

“(Denver) has not had the steady decline that you see in many other cities,” he said. “It looks like a more jagged example.”

It’s difficult to determine what exactly causes some cities to see less violence while others see more, Grawert said. It may be early to call the uptick in Denver homicides a definitive trend, he added.

“But it’s definitely concerning and worth people’s time to dig into,” he said.

Last year also marked the highest number of children killed in Denver in a single year between 2015 and 2018. Eight victims younger than the age of 18 were killed in Denver last year, including 3-year-old Jeromiah Gurule and two 7-year-olds, Jordan Vong and Caden McWilliams. Prosecutors have charged family members in the killings of the three young boys.

Denver homicide data from last year also show:

The neighborhoods with the most homicides in 2018 were Five Points and Montbello, which each had six.

Men accounted for 87 percent of all homicide victims.

Firearms were used in nearly three-quarters of all homicides. Knives were the second most-common weapon.

Of the 32 cases where police have determined the relationship between the suspect and the victim, 11 of the victims were killed by strangers and eight were killed by acquaintances. The remainder were killed by family members, intimate partners or work associates.

Although black people make up less than 10 percent of the city’s population, about 40 percent of all homicide victims were black.

Last year also saw several high-profile homicides, including the killings of three homeless people sleeping near Interstate 25 and an Uber driver who shot and killed a passenger.

New police initiatives

Denver police have announced three new initiatives over the past two weeks aimed at preventing crime and addressing underlying causes such as addiction, domestic violence and mental health crises.

The department last week also announced a new team to target midlevel drug dealers and an initiative where officers will hand out information packets about domestic violence resources to people they believe might be abusers in an effort to prevent further violence or disturbances. The officers will use the letters after responding to an incident that did not rise to the level of a crime, like a call for a verbal disturbance, but evidence indicates domestic violence may be a factor.

A “citywide impact team” that includes a professional counselor has been working since the fall to conduct community outreach in specific areas to address ongoing concerns and criminal activity. The team responded to the Five Points area after the November gang shooting and spoke with dozens of businesses and residents, according to a department news release.

De La Torre, the owner of La Popular, said he recognized the difficulties the police faced when addressing the complex issues of Five Points.

“At least they’re trying,” he said.