Barnum Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Barnum is a west-Denver neighborhood centered on Federal Boulevard and West Colfax-area side streets, named for showman P.T. Barnum, who once owned land here. Predominantly residential mid-century single-family, with Barnum Park and a long commercial spine along Federal.
April 2026 was a narrow month in Barnum — two categories moved, both below trend. The shape is modest but consistent with a broader downward drift across property crime in the neighborhood.
Vandalism and motor vehicle theft each registered below-trend signals. Vandalism's 12-month total stands at 51 incidents against a baseline of 65.76, and the trailing 12-month count is down 10.5% from the prior year's 57. Motor vehicle theft ran similarly soft — 37 incidents over the current 12 months versus 51 in the year before, a 27.5% decline. Every other tracked category either held within range or showed its own 12-month decline, including robbery down 60.0% (4 incidents vs. 10) and aggravated assault down 33.3% (22 vs. 33).
Notable signals 2
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 51 incidents — about 22% below the 66 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 37 incidents — about 44% below the 66 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
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 Barnum 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.”
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Barnum, 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.