Capitol Hill Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Capitol Hill is the dense urban neighborhood immediately east of the State Capitol building, organized around Colfax Avenue, East 13th Avenue, and the historic mansions along Grant and Pennsylvania streets. A mix of pre-war apartment buildings, converted Victorians, and small-lot row homes makes it one of Denver's most populated neighborhoods per acre.
Two signals moved in Capitol Hill this April — one a single-month below-trend reading in motor vehicle theft, one a structural shift in theft from vehicle. The pattern is mixed: property crime is pulling in opposite directions depending on which category you're looking at.
Motor vehicle theft is down sharply over the trailing 12 months, 158 incidents against a prior 12-month total of 208 — a 24.0% decline and well below the multi-year baseline. Theft from vehicle tells the opposite story: a sustained shift upward, with 426 incidents over the current 12 months versus 288 in the year before, a 47.9% increase. Every other tracked category — robbery, burglary, aggravated assault, vandalism, other larceny, arson — ran within normal range this month.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 158 incidents — about 50% below the 315 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.
- Theft from Vehicle is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 426, up 48% from 288 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
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 Capitol Hill compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Montbello
156 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Capitol Hill's 158.
Open page →West Colfax
133 incidents over the past 12 months — 25 below Capitol Hill's 158.
Open page →Hampden
119 incidents over the past 12 months — 39 below Capitol Hill's 158.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Capitol Hill, 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.