Berkeley Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Berkeley is a northwest Denver neighborhood centered on Tennyson Street between West 38th and West 52nd Avenues, named after the now-vanished Berkeley Lake. The Tennyson commercial strip is a walkable mix of restaurants and shops; the side streets are early-20th-century bungalows and Denver Squares.
April 2026 produced two signals in Berkeley — a one-month drop in motor vehicle theft and a streak break in arson. The rest of the tracked categories were within range, making this a narrow month rather than a broad structural shift.
The arson streak break is the more distinctive of the two: arson surfaced after a long quiet gap, which is the defining feature of that signal type. Motor vehicle theft ran below trend on the month, consistent with the 12-month picture — 37 incidents against 53 in the prior year, down 30.2% year-over-year. The broader property crime backdrop in Berkeley is also downward: robbery is off 63.6% over the trailing 12 months, burglary down 21.7%, and theft from vehicle down 16.3%, though other larceny moved in the opposite direction at 35.6% above the prior year.
Notable signals 2
Arson
First incident since December 2023 — a 2-year gap ended this month.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 37 incidents — about 56% below the 84 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 Berkeley compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month arson 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 arson levels.”
Barnum West
1 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Berkeley's 1.
Open page →Bear Valley
1 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Berkeley's 1.
Open page →Fort Logan
1 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Berkeley's 1.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Berkeley has spiked burglary historically (5 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 20% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Burglary | 5 | 20% |
| Aggravated assault | 3 | — too few |
Each row shows Berkeley's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 5 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 Berkeley, 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.