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.
Three signals moved in Civic Center this April — two one-month spikes and one sustained structural shift. The shape is concentrated rather than broad: other larceny is both the spike of the month and the category with the deepest multi-month upward drift, while vandalism registered its own independent spike alongside it.
Other larceny sits at 160 incidents over the trailing 12 months, up 42.9% against the prior year's 112. The sustained-shift signal adds weight to that number — this isn't a single noisy month but a pattern that has been building across the full window. Vandalism is also running 27.3% above the prior 12 months (154 vs. 121). Burglary and theft from vehicle are both up double digits on a 12-month basis as well, though neither crossed a signal threshold this month. Motor vehicle theft was the one clear mover in the other direction, down 24.5% against the prior year.
Notable signals 2
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 160 incidents — about 73% above the 92 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 154 incidents — about 41% 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.
- Other Larceny is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 160, up 43% from 112 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 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 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.”
Hampden South
155 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Civic Center's 160.
Open page →City Park West
153 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 below Civic Center's 160.
Open page →Virginia Village
169 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 above Civic Center's 160.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Civic Center has spiked other larceny historically (10 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 10 | 100% |
| Vandalism | 5 | 100% |
| Burglary | 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.