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.
Three signals surfaced in Central Park this June — two one-month below-trend readings and one sustained structural shift. The shape is concentrated: motor vehicle theft is doing the heavy lifting, appearing in two of the three signals, while vandalism adds a second below-trend reading. Nothing spiked, and no rare events registered.
Motor vehicle theft is the defining move. The trailing 12-month total stands at 190, down 46.9% against the prior year's 358 — and the sustained-shift signal confirms this isn't a single quiet month but a structural change holding across multiple periods. Vandalism also ran below trend, with 276 incidents over the current 12 months against 304 in the prior year, a 9.2% decline. Every other tracked category — robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft from vehicle, other larceny — finished within its normal range for the month.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 190 incidents — about 74% below the 733 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 276 incidents — about 36% below the 430 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 190, down 47% from 358 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 June 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 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
168 incidents over the past 12 months — 22 below Central Park's 190.
Open page →Capitol Hill
157 incidents over the past 12 months — 33 below Central Park's 190.
Open page →West Colfax
125 incidents over the past 12 months — 65 below Central Park's 190.
Open page →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.