Civic Center Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Civic Center is the small downtown neighborhood that contains Civic Center Park, the State Capitol, the Denver City and County Building, and the Denver Art Museum. Almost no residential population — the geography is government, museum, and parks land.
Four categories moved in Civic Center this September, two one-month spikes and two structural sustained shifts. The spikes, other larceny and vandalism, sit on top of 12-month totals that are already running above the prior year. The sustained shifts tell the longer story: burglary in particular has been climbing over multiple months, not just a noisy single-month read.
Burglary is up 85.3% over the trailing 12 months, 63 incidents against 34 in the year before, the sharpest year-over-year move in the neighborhood's property crime categories. Theft from vehicle has followed a similar arc, 106 incidents vs. 67, up 58.2%. Other larceny, the strongest single-month signal, reached 188 incidents over the current 12-month window. On the other side, robbery and aggravated assault both fell: robbery is down 33.3% year-over-year (12 incidents vs. 18), and aggravated assault is down 22.2% (56 vs. 72). The net picture is a neighborhood where violent crime is receding but property crime across multiple categories is running well above prior-year levels.
Notable signals 2
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 188 incidents — about 97% above the 96 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 151 incidents — about 38% above the 109 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 106, up 58% from 67 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Burglary is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 63, up 85% from 34 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 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 Civic Center compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
Virginia Village
188 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Civic Center's 188.
Open page →East Colfax
185 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Civic Center's 188.
Open page →Mar Lee
194 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 above Civic Center's 188.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Civic Centerdoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 2 | — too few |
| Vandalism | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Civic Center's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 6 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 Civic Center, 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.