Cheesman Park Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Cheesman Park is the dense residential neighborhood surrounding the eponymous park, just east of Capitol Hill. Pre-war high-rise apartment buildings line the park's edges; the side streets are a mix of Victorians, bungalows, and four-story walk-ups.
Two signals surfaced in Cheesman Park this April — one short-term drop and one sustained structural shift, both in the same category. Motor vehicle theft is doing the work this month, accounting for both tracked signals and pointing to a longer-term change rather than a single quiet week.
Motor vehicle theft has fallen 37.0% over the trailing 12 months, from 92 incidents to 58, against a multi-year baseline of 120.56 — the sustained-shift signal reflects that structural gap, not just a one-month dip. The rest of the tracked categories were within range: burglary is down 12.3% year-over-year, vandalism down 13.6%, and robbery down 28.6%, but none of those moves crossed the threshold for a signal this month.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 58 incidents — about 52% below the 121 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 58, down 37% from 92 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 Cheesman 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.”
Athmar Park
58 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Cheesman Park's 58.
Open page →City Park West
58 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Cheesman Park's 58.
Open page →College View - South Platte
60 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Cheesman Park's 58.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Cheesman Park has spiked burglary historically (7 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 100% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Burglary | 7 | 100% |
| Other larceny | 6 | 83.3% |
Each row shows Cheesman 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 Cheesman 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.