CBD Crime Rate Trends — Denver
CBD (Central Business District) is downtown Denver's office-and-tower core, bounded roughly by Speer Boulevard, Broadway, 20th Street, and the South Platte. The 16th Street Mall pedestrian spine bisects the district between Civic Center and Union Station.
September 2026 was a focused month for Denver's CBD. Two signals surfaced, both in the same category: aggravated assault registered a one-month below-trend signal and a longer structural decline. The story here is narrow in breadth but meaningful in depth.
Aggravated assault is down 46.9% over the trailing 12 months, 51 incidents against 96 in the prior year. That sustained shift confirms this isn't a single quiet month but a multi-year repositioning. Every other tracked category, robbery, burglary, theft from vehicle, other larceny, motor vehicle theft, and vandalism, ran within normal range and produced no additional signals.
Notable signals 1
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 51 incidents — about 42% below the 87 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.
- Aggravated Assault has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 51, down 47% from 96 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through September 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 CBD compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month aggravated assault 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 aggravated assault levels.”
Elyria Swansea
51 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below CBD's 51.
Open page →City Park West
47 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below CBD's 51.
Open page →Civic Center
56 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above CBD's 51.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for CBD, 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.