Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Health and Safety Committee with Denver City Council.

Coverage of the Health and Safety Committee starts now.

Good morning and welcome to the Health and Safety Committee meeting.

Today is Wednesday, February 18th.

My name is Darren Watson.

I'm honored to serve as the chair of the Health and Safety Committee as well as to serve all of residents of the Fine District 9.

We have two briefings this morning, but before we roll into the briefings, why don't we have community community?

Why don't we have city council introductions first?

Uh we'll start first to our right with Councilmember.

We're here, we're here, Flynn.

Hi, how are you doing?

Good morning.

You just start on the other side.

Uh good morning, Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver District 2.

Good morning, Amanda Sawyer, District 5.

Good morning, Paul Cashman, South Denver District 6.

Uh good morning, Sadana Gonzalez Piquetez, one of your council members at large.

Jamie Torres, West Denver District 3.

And online we have, I believe Council President Proten.

Uh good morning, Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver District 4.

Let's do a voice check, see if Council President Sandoval is on, even though I've got the notes.

Seeing that she isn't, once uh council president joins, we'll announce her.

So we have two briefings.

Uh, briefing on Denver homicide decline, and we'll start off with Chief Thomas and Chief Thomas.

If you're on the team, don't mind going around uh introducing yourselves as well, and then the floor is yours.

Well, thank you.

So I'm the police chief Ron Thomas, and we are excited today to uh to talk about our substantial declines in both homicides and non fatal shootings.

Certainly much of the credit for our success is due to the hard work of the men and women of the Denver Police Department, the officers, the investigators, our crime analysts who provide us the data with which we can build our strategies.

Um the two uh key figures uh in our strategy are going to be presenting today.

So uh to my left is Commander Matt Clark.

Uh he's the commander of our major crimes division.

Uh so his investigators do all the work, provide the surety of consequences, and also his uh data team uh provides a lot of the statistical data by which we um uh identify causal factors, which again inform our strategies.

And then to my right, Commander Jay Carrera, who works out of my office, and he is the one who operationalizes a lot of our uh strategies uh based on data and smart practice.

And before you all jump in, I just saw that Council President uh Sandoval, I believe, just joined a meeting.

Council President, thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Sorry for being late.

No problem.

Thank you so much for being here.

I'll turn back over to the team.

Thank you.

So we are presenting on the homicide decline, and to put our recent successes in context, we'll give a brief overview on the last 30 years or so of Denver Homicide history.

So Denver Homicides trend has a clear arc over the last 35 years.

There was a peak in their early 90s from 1991 to 1995, and then a pretty substantial decline during the 2000s mid-200 tens, except for a peak in 2003 and 2006.

And this was a localized localized surge in homicides that was not carried out uh that didn't show up nationwide, which leads to the point that homicide rate like politics, everything is local.

So what happens at politics, federal level certainly influences local politics, but just like uh mayor in the 80s could forget to plow the streets, and that leads to a big deal.

We can have localized strategies, successes, failures that are responsible to some degree for changes in homicide rate.

The years 2020 to 2023 were the worst in this period, and we've with a peak in two 2021 with 96 murders, and since that time we're at a 60% reduction.

How we compare to other our peer sister cities, which are all cities between 250,000 residents to one million, so this data is from the real-time crime index, which is run by the professional criminologist Jeff Asher.

He's fantastic.

He uh and and we we are reliant on him because the federal government only produces crime stats once a year, and we won't know last year until this October.

So he uses a team to gather statistics once a month, and this is what this is based on.

Rates are expressed per 100,000.

That's what the number on the left is to give direct comparison.

So for cities our size, last year, the majority of them averaged together saw a 20% decline.

We saw a 45% decline, which has us, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, as the largest year-over-year reduction in murder.

And although there was the 20% average decline, murders did not decrease all over, notably in Little Rock, Little Rock and Milwaukee.

There were spikes, increases year over year, and some of our cities in our weight class, such as El Paso and Raleigh were flat.

As a reminder, last year, these were our three core strategies to achieve a reduction in gun crime.

And I'll go over these briefly.