Auraria Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Auraria is the campus neighborhood at the western edge of downtown, on the wedge of land between the South Platte River and Cherry Creek where Denver was founded in 1858. Today the area is dominated by the shared Auraria Higher Education Center campus serving Metro State, CU Denver, and Community College of Denver.
April 2026 in Auraria was a focused month — one spike and one zero-event signal, with all other tracked categories within normal range. The dominant move was vandalism, a single sharp above-trend signal against an otherwise contained backdrop.
Vandalism is the clearest structural story here: 70 incidents in the current 12-month window against 50 in the prior year, a 40.0% year-over-year increase. Motor vehicle theft moved the other direction — 25 incidents in the trailing 12 months versus 31 the year before, down 19.4%. Theft from vehicle and other larceny both held nearly flat, and aggravated assault sits at 11 incidents against 10 the prior year, a difference too small to read as a trend.
Notable signals 1
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 70 incidents — about 35% above the 52 average from prior years.
All categories, last 24 months
Each panel: recent monthly count vs. trailing 12-month context. MoM is the most recent month vs. the one before; 12mo YoY compares the trailing year to the year before that.
What's been quietly true for a year
Spikes get attention. Sustained shifts shape policy. These are multi-quarter patterns where the past 12-month total differs meaningfully from the year before — they often precede the baseline resetting.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through April 2026, with a likely range we're 95% confident the actual count will fall inside. Categories with too little recent volume — or violent categories at the neighborhood level — show no forecast and are surfaced through signals above instead. See the methodology page for the gating rules.
Aggravated Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Arson
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
Burglary
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
Homicide
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Motor Vehicle Theft
Other Larceny
Robbery
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Theft from Vehicle
Vandalism
How Auraria compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month vandalism volume — a pragmatic v1 of peer matching. Demographic / housing-stock peer matching isn't built yet (we deliberately don't ingest income or race data alongside crime). Volume similarity has the right intuition: “neighborhoods experiencing comparable vandalism levels.”
Lowry Field
70 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Auraria's 70.
Open page →Ruby Hill
69 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Auraria's 70.
Open page →Virginia Village
71 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Auraria's 70.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Auraria has spiked theft from vehicle historically (7 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 0% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Theft from vehicle | 7 | 0% |
| Other larceny | 3 | — too few |
| Vandalism | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Auraria's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 7 adjacent neighborhoods spiked the same category within the next 3 months. A high same-category rate suggests a shock that travels (e.g. theft crews moving across Denver); a low rate means spikes here tend to be local to the neighborhood. Categories with fewer than 5 historical spike events are listed but their rates are suppressed.
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Auraria, excluding generic crime taxonomy. Useful as texture — what kinds of specifics show up here that don't show up elsewhere.
Hour-of-day, day-of-week, and seasonality
Distribution of bucketed incidents in this neighborhood 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.
How we built this page
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from Denver Open Data — DPD's NIBRS-coded crime offenses on ArcGIS Hub — mapped to 9 NIBRS-aligned categories (sexual assault is excluded because DPD redacts victim-bearing rows from the public feed). The feed publishes a 5-year rolling window so the analysis baseline starts at 2021-01. Aggregated to statistical neighborhood × category × month.Anomalies are surfaced using strict thresholds (~p < 0.01). Forecasts are Prophet with low-count gating; violent categories at the neighborhood level skip the forecast and show rare-event / streak signals instead.
Spike rule: 12-mo total > baseline mean + 2.5σ AND ≥ 20 incidents AND 6-mo confirms. Drop rule: 12-mo total < baseline mean − 2.5σ AND baseline mean ≥ 20. Rare event: any incident in the last 90 days, no prior comparable in ≥ 5 years.