Denver Crime Rate Trends
Data sourced from the Denver Police Department (DPD) Open Data portal and analyzed by Public Analyst.ai: 78 neighborhoods, 9 incident categories, twelve months of trailing comparison. Browse the rankings, scan the multi-year trends, or open a neighborhood-level breakdown.
City Park aggravated assault rose 79% against its multi-year baseline, the strongest single-category signal in Denver this month and the headline of this briefing. Mar Lee's other-larceny pattern has been the persistent backdrop, sitting at the top of the underlying rankings last month, but this briefing opens with a new bucket: a sharp uptick in aggravated assault at a single neighborhood rather than the distributed larceny picture that dominated July.
Citywide volume is down 8.2% against the prior 12 months, 39,178 incidents against 42,664 in the year before. The signal mix tells a more complicated story than the citywide decline suggests: 18 spikes and 59 sustained-shift signals are active this month alongside 75 below-trend signals. Other larceny is running above trend across multiple neighborhoods, with Mar Lee, Hale, and Civic Center each registering spikes in the top five.
The other-larceny pattern is appearing across enough neighborhoods simultaneously that it warrants watching regardless of the headline rotation. City Park aggravated assault is a first-month signal with no prior run, so its durability is unproven. If both threads persist into September, the briefing will face a structural story on larceny alongside a potentially developing assault pattern, but the current data supports only noting the divergence, not forecasting it.
Denver Crime Frequently Asked Questions
Trailing 12 months vs the prior 12 months, computed from the same NIBRS-aligned categories used everywhere else on the page. Updated each August 2026 briefing.
Is crime in Denver down?
Yes. Citywide incident volume is 8.2% lower than the prior 12 months.
Across the trailing 12-month window we tracked 39,178 incidents in NIBRS-aligned categories, compared to 42,664 in the year before, down 3,486 incidents.
Is violent crime in Denver down?
Yes. Homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, and sexual assault are down 8.7% combined in the trailing 12 months.
That's 3,378 violent incidents in the past year against 3,701 in the prior year. See the by-category section below for the per-bucket breakdown.
Is property crime in Denver down?
Yes. Burglary, theft from vehicle, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson are down 8.7% combined in the trailing 12 months.
That's 28,808 property incidents in the past year against 31,554 in the prior year.
What are the safest neighborhoods to stay in Denver?
- Wellshire — 9.4 incidents per 1,000 residents
- Indian Creek — 12.1 incidents per 1,000 residents
- North Park Hill — 18.0 incidents per 1,000 residents
The three safest neighborhoods in Denver, ranked by trailing-12-month incidents per 1,000 residents.
Computed as NIBRS-aligned trailing-12-month incident totals divided by the latest ACS 5-year residential population, expressed per 1,000 residents. Restricted to neighborhoods with at least 1,000 residents so park-only and industrial geographies, where visitor populations are not reflected in the residential denominator, are excluded.
Which neighborhood in Denver saw the biggest crime drop?
Montclair: 47.1% fewer incidents than the prior 12 months.
Montclair logged 243 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 459 the year before.
Which neighborhood in Denver saw the biggest crime increase?
Mar Lee: 17.0% more incidents than the prior 12 months.
Mar Lee logged 482 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 412 the year before.
The denominators behind the numbers
High-plains city pressed against the eastern foothills of the Front Range, sitting at roughly one mile of elevation. The South Platte River runs north-south through the urban core and meets Cherry Creek just south of Lower Downtown; together they organize the city's older grid. East of the river the layout follows the standard cardinal grid; the historic core (LoDo, Capitol Hill, Five Points) is rotated about 45° to align with the South Platte.
ACS 2024 5-year estimates, county-level (Denver County). Denver is a consolidated city-county, so the county and city are coterminous — these aggregates describe the same population the police data covers.
City-level only. We deliberately do not juxtapose these with neighborhood-level crime data — see the methodology for why.
Denver covers more land than every Bay Area peer combined and is roughly twice the footprint of Seattle. Density falls off sharply outside the central core: LoDo, Capitol Hill, Cherry Creek, and the Highland/Berkeley belt are dense and walkable; the southeast and far-northeast neighborhoods (Hampden, Montbello, Green Valley Ranch, DIA) are lower-density car-oriented. Crime-rate denominators differ sharply across this core/periphery axis.
DPD publishes incidents through Denver's ArcGIS Hub portal rather than Socrata; the feed is NIBRS-coded and has covered the previous five calendar years plus the current year-to-date since 2019. Sexual-assault incidents are not present in the public feed because DPD redacts victim-bearing rows; the bucket is excluded from the analysis at the city page level. Earlier history is not retained upstream — the analysis window is anchored at 2021-01, the upstream floor when Denver was onboarded (May 2026).
Every neighborhood, color-coded
Largest moves this month
| # | Neighborhood | Category | MoM | YoY 12mo | vs baseline | 90-day trend | Signal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Mar Lee | Other Larceny | -70% | +157% | +217% | SPIKE | |
| 02 | Hale | Other Larceny | +15% | +62% | +86% | SPIKE | |
| 03 | Civic Center | Other Larceny | +40% | +31% | +91% | SPIKE | |
| 04 | East Colfax | Other Larceny | +44% | +24% | +56% | SPIKE | |
| 05 | Jefferson Park | Other Larceny | -13% | +53% | +37% | SPIKE | |
| 06 | Ruby Hill | Other Larceny | +25% | +27% | +38% | SPIKE | |
| 07 | Whittier | Other Larceny | +120% | +44% | +90% | SPIKE | |
| 08 | Overland | Other Larceny | -25% | +17% | +62% | SPIKE | |
| 09 | University Hills | Other Larceny | -55% | +31% | +211% | SPIKE | |
| 10 | Five Points | Other Larceny | 0% | +22% | +31% | SPIKE | |
| 11 | City Park | Aggravated Assault | +300% | +33% | +79% | SPIKE | |
| 12 | City Park West | Other Larceny | -33% | +22% | +35% | SPIKE |
The long arc — eight years of monthly counts
Four neighborhoods worth your time
Mar Lee
The past 12 months saw 203 incidents — about 217% above the 64 average from prior years.
Read briefing →SPIKE · OTHER LARCENYHale
The past 12 months saw 177 incidents — about 86% above the 95 average from prior years.
Read briefing →SPIKE · OTHER LARCENYCivic Center
The past 12 months saw 180 incidents — about 91% above the 94 average from prior years.
Read briefing →SPIKE · OTHER LARCENYEast Colfax
The past 12 months saw 171 incidents — about 56% above the 110 average from prior years.
Read briefing →Hour-of-day, day-of-week, and seasonality
Distribution of bucketed incidents citywide across the full analysis window. Useful for routine context — shopping-strip thefts vs. late-night assaults read very differently when you can see when each typically happens.
All 78 Denver neighborhoods
Crime rate trends and August 2026 briefings for every tracked neighborhood. Alphabetical.
- Athmar Park crime rate
- Auraria crime rate
- Baker crime rate
- Barnum crime rate
- Barnum West crime rate
- Bear Valley crime rate
- Belcaro crime rate
- Berkeley crime rate
- Capitol Hill crime rate
- CBD crime rate
- Central Park crime rate
- Chaffee Park crime rate
- Cheesman Park crime rate
- Cherry Creek crime rate
- City Park crime rate
- City Park West crime rate
- Civic Center crime rate
- Clayton crime rate
- Cole crime rate
- College View - South Platte crime rate
- Congress Park crime rate
- Cory - Merrill crime rate
- Country Club crime rate
- DIA crime rate
- East Colfax crime rate
- Elyria Swansea crime rate
- Five Points crime rate
- Fort Logan crime rate
- Gateway - Green Valley Ranch crime rate
- Globeville crime rate
- Goldsmith crime rate
- Hale crime rate
- Hampden crime rate
- Hampden South crime rate
- Harvey Park crime rate
- Harvey Park South crime rate
- Highland crime rate
- Hilltop crime rate
- Indian Creek crime rate
- Jefferson Park crime rate
- Kennedy crime rate
- Lincoln Park crime rate
- Lowry Field crime rate
- Mar Lee crime rate
- Marston crime rate
- Montbello crime rate
- Montclair crime rate
- North Capitol Hill crime rate
- North Park Hill crime rate
- Northeast Park Hill crime rate
- Overland crime rate
- Platt Park crime rate
- Regis crime rate
- Rosedale crime rate
- Ruby Hill crime rate
- Skyland crime rate
- Sloan Lake crime rate
- South Park Hill crime rate
- Southmoor Park crime rate
- Speer crime rate
- Sun Valley crime rate
- Sunnyside crime rate
- Union Station crime rate
- University crime rate
- University Hills crime rate
- University Park crime rate
- Valverde crime rate
- Villa Park crime rate
- Virginia Village crime rate
- Washington Park crime rate
- Washington Park West crime rate
- Washington Virginia Vale crime rate
- Wellshire crime rate
- West Colfax crime rate
- West Highland crime rate
- Westwood crime rate
- Whittier crime rate
- Windsor crime rate
How We Calculate Denver Crime Trends
Open about how we define spikes, what we exclude as noise, where the data comes from, and how often the model is wrong.