Weekly brief · 13 August 2026

Colorado counts its crimes twice, and gets two answers

Every figure here is read from a published document, or worked out from figures that are. Each one is checked again from this page every time it is built.

The gap is widest on murder and robbery

Colorado publishes its crime figures twice. The Bureau of Investigation collects them from police departments. The Department of Public Safety publishes its own extract. Both are the State of Colorado. For 2024 the two do not match.

The Bureau counts 267 murders. Public Safety counts 354. For robbery the Bureau counts 3,823 and Public Safety counts 6,198.

We publish both counts. We do not pick one. The Bureau also updates its figures every night, so they move.

Colorado’s flat tax changed rate two years running

Colorado's income tax is called flat. That means one rate for everybody. The rate still changes from year to year.

It was 4.25% for 2024 and 4.4% for 2025. On fifty thousand dollars of taxable income that is $2,125, then $2,200.

The rate moves because of the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights. That rule is in the state constitution. When revenue goes above a cap, the state has to return the extra. Cutting the income tax rate for a year is one way it does that. Your own bill works the same way: taxable income times the rate for that year.

One records request, still unanswered

We asked the state for its spending records, transaction by transaction, under the open records law. The state has not answered.

Until it does, this site cannot tell you what your county paid in. It says so, rather than estimating.

The state's own transparency system has not been updated since November 2022. We report that as a date. We do not call it a breach of the law, because we have not established what the law requires.

A note on the checking

Every figure above comes from a state document. Each one is read again from this page every time the page is built.

The Bureau revised four of its 2024 counts this week, and all four went up. That is in the corrections log. A change made by the publisher is not a mistake by us, and the log says which is which.

Where these figures come from

Every figure above is one of two kinds, and this is which. FACT means a publisher printed the figure and we read it there. CALC means we worked it out from figures a publisher printed, and the arithmetic is on the methodology page. Nothing here is estimated.