Let’s start easy.
Who believes that Santa drops into your house once a year to leave off presents, which were often made in China before Donald Trump took back the White House?

Well, that’s a good start.

So, how many of you non-believers set out cookies and milk on Christmas Eve?

Yup.

I think what’s happened here in Aurora and across the country is that at an early age, we’re passionately taught to believe in myths that are loosely based on what we’re later taught in school to understand as “correlative” evidence rather than “causative” proof.

Mom and Gramps tell you Santa’s on his way. You sing about it for weeks. You go through the cookie caper and awake to find just what you wanted for Christmas, crumbs on the plate and a few months later, plastic eggs under the bushes in the front yard with quarters and candy inside them.

In a perfect world, as we get older we understand that, yes, the presents appear. The “cause” of the gifts, however, is not what we were passionately told to believe. Alas, it was Gramps or Mommy who dropped that long-awaited Johnny Astro set under the tree.

The job now is to explain all this to members of the city council who just don’t get it.

For years, and especially for the last few months, a handful of Aurora city lawmakers just know in their heart of hearts that if you punish people severely with mandatory jail sentences for crimes like shoplifting and loitering, the scofflaws will avoid such bad behavior and we’ll all live happily ever after.

Years and years of real science doing real studies showing real results that consistently prove that human criminal behavior is not much affected by the threat of severe consequences, like prison, embarrassment or even the death penalty.

Really, really, folks.

Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama have the highest murder rates in the nation, and they all have the death penalty.

The harshest penalties for car theft are in Texas, which has the seventh highest car-theft rate in the nation.

There’s even boatloads of research helping us all to understand why some humans seem to be immune from what most of us think is a natural response to contemplating doing something wrong, bad or even felonious: not wanting to get caught and pay the consequences.

It turns out that the fear of getting caught diminishes greatly if we don’t think we’re going to get caught right away or at all. It’s the fear of imminent or immediate retribution that keeps us mostly in line.

You don’t have to read a bunch of studies to understand this. Just drive on I-225 for a few minutes. It’s a freaking freeway free-for-all. These aren’t felons in cars weaving around traffic at 100 mph, they’re just idiot ass hats who are certain they won’t get caught. I’m certain they won’t get caught either. I haven’t seen a state patrol officer or an Arapahoe County sheriff deputy or an Aurora cop on the interstate pulling someone over in years. And years.

Yet all of these road racers know the penalties for aggravated reckless driving. Still, they persist.

But one of the biggest problems with Aurora shoplifters and arguments against mandatory jail? They’re repeat offenders. They do get caught. They tell their friends they got caught. They go to court. They go to jail. They get out, and they do it all again.

Despite the clear and unmistakable evidence that incarceration does not prevent crime, or addiction, or recidivism, some city lawmakers just can’t let it go.

Chief offenders of defenders of the myth these days are council members Stephanie Hancock, Francoise Bergan and Angela Lawson.

This week, as the city council was forced by the Colorado Supreme Court to take Aurora’s “tough on crime” minimum jail sentences for shoplifting and being a vagrant off the books, Hancock laid out a few minutes of terse talk targeting Aurora outsiders.

She blamed state legislators for not allowing the city to do whatever it wants to people busted for stealing dog food or TVs.

Hancock said that we, as a city, can’t just let people go around breaking the law just because they want to.

That wasn’t the case. It was the Colorado Supreme Court that pointed out that it was Aurora breaking the law by imposing the illegal minimum sentences for petty crimes.

It’s apparently a case of “rules for thee but not for we.” We just can’t let shoplifters off the hook with a little jail time and fines, but it’s OK for the City of Aurora to thwart 250 years of jurisprudence and the Colorado Constitution.

Perhaps Hancock confuses Santa and Trump at this point, another politician who hates science but loves rules.

Regardless, Hancock made a long case for voting “yes” on a measure to bring Aurora back inside state law and then voted “no” saying it was important for her to thumb her nose — and other novelties — at outside powers who are not letting Aurora have its way, regardless of facts, science or reality.

She said she hopes the city council will “grow a pair” and do something.

Given Hancock’s repeated remonstrance against the frequent vulgarities some members of the public regularly fling at the council dais from the public commenter lectern, I can only assume Hancock was referring to a pair of handcuffs.

She insisted that Aurora’s hokey pokey policy for shoplifters has driven down the shoplifting rate, and the proof is in the numbers.

Those numbers show that shoplifting complaints have fallen in the past few years in Aurora. But also in Denver. And Broomfield. And Littleton. And Arvada. And, well, someone needs to explain to Hancock and other mandatory minimum faithful on the dais that it doesn’t work that way and, sorry, Santa didn’t leave all that stuff under the tree.

Really really.

Maybe a more practical solution would be to pass out pairs of ruby red slippers on the dais and teach everyone to click three times for less fentanyl, more jail time and $5,000 Trump Tariff Checks.

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