After crime in Wheat Ridge peaked during the pandemic in 2021, the Wheat Ridge Police Department has been aggressively tackling hyper-local issues through strong staffing and proactive policing to create a better, safer quality of life for residents.
In 2025, persons crimes, things like robberies, assaults and homicide, were level compared to 2024. The Department saw a nearly 10% decrease in property crime in 2025, marking the fourth-straight year where overall calls and crime levels have dropped.
Significant dips in calls for crime included a 44% decrease in robberies, 39% drop in motor vehicle theft, 30% decrease in burglaries and a 13% decrease in fraud.
Theft remains high in our community, rising nearly 3% from last year, representing a five-year high. The majority of theft reports into the Wheat Ridge Police Department come from local and large businesses in the form of shoplifting. The department also saw a 56% uptick of calls for sex offenses against children in 2025, mainly due to increased referrals from the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force that deals with cases of child pornography or explicit images shared over social media.
Since 2021, overall crime levels have dropped 40% in Wheat Ridge. That does not happen without community support for the department’s mission.
“We have been unwavering in our mission of building relationships and trust with our community,” said Wheat Ridge Police Chief Chris Murtha. “Our philosophy of ‘Compassion with Boundaries’ is a compass for the character of our department. Our officers go to work every day with the mission to help people but will be firm in our responsibility to enforce the law.”
The department continues to hold strong staffing levels, with eight recruits currently in the academy set to graduate this summer. Because of the support from the community and the culture of the department, Wheat Ridge PD remains an attractive place to start a law enforcement career, and with opportunities to train and grow, an excellent place to evolve as an officer or detective.
Because the department is fully staffed, and at times leaning into over-hire, patrol and specialized teams are outfitted to not just be reactive to crime, but proactive. The department focused more on building relationships with businesses in 2025, with the creation of a new Business Liaison position, to help with crime prevention techniques and streamlining better outcomes for any challenges they may face, and responding more quickly to calls for theft.
The department remains invested in regional tasks forces, including the CAPTA Metropolitan Auto Theft Task Force (CMATT), and the West Metro Drug Task Force, to target criminal organizations that are stealing cars and distributing drugs in our community.
While the department is fully staffed, the call volume for individual officers remains high. Wheat Ridge is a unique community, with several state and federal highways cut through the city, in addition to our borders with Denver, Lakewood and Arvada. Crime does not often stop at jurisdictional lines, and the hundreds of thousands of people who travel through the community create an outsized burden on department resources. As a result, the department has been committed to leveraging technology to make officers more efficient, including a new E-Ticketing system to minimize the time for traffic stops, to automated speed cameras that allow department resources to focus more on proactive police work and building relationships.
While the numbers and trends look promising, the work continues. Complacency is not an option and the goal remains the same: to make Wheat Ridge the safest community in Colorado.
