Central Park Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Central Park is a master-planned mixed-use neighborhood in northeast Denver, built on the footprint of the former Stapleton airport (the airport closed in 1995 and the neighborhood was originally named Stapleton; the name was changed to Central Park in 2020). Today it's a New Urbanist development of single-family homes, townhouses, and walkable town-center retail along East 29th Avenue.
Four categories moved in Central Park this April — three one-month below-trend signals and one sustained structural shift. The direction is broadly downward across property and violent crime, with motor vehicle theft, burglary, and robbery all running below recent baselines and no fresh spikes in the mix.
Vandalism leads the below-trend signals: the current 12-month total is 282 incidents against a baseline of 421.68, a gap that reflects a material departure from recent norms. Robbery is down 19.3% year-over-year (46 incidents vs. 57), and motor vehicle theft is down 38.2% (225 vs. 364). Aggravated assault is the one counter-move — up 14.5% over the prior 12 months — but it did not cross the signal threshold this period.
Notable signals 3
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 282 incidents — about 33% below the 422 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 46 incidents — about 31% below the 67 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 225 incidents — about 69% below the 724 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 225, down 38% from 364 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 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 Central Park 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.”
Gateway - Green Valley Ranch
257 incidents over the past 12 months — 25 below Central Park's 282.
Open page →Capitol Hill
358 incidents over the past 12 months — 76 above Central Park's 282.
Open page →North Capitol Hill
196 incidents over the past 12 months — 86 below Central Park's 282.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Central Park has spiked other larceny historically (14 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 92.9% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 14 | 92.9% |
Each row shows Central Park'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 Central Park, 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.