Cole Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Cole is an inner-ring neighborhood just north of Five Points, between East 32nd and East 40th Avenues. Industrial and warehouse uses along the railroad tracks to the west give way to a residential grid of bungalows and Victorians as you move east toward York.
August 2026 produced a single notable signal in Cole: aggravated assault running well below its multi-year pace. One category moved this month, and the direction is downward. Everything else, burglary, theft from vehicle, vandalism, robbery, other larceny, motor vehicle theft, stayed within normal range for the month.
Aggravated assault stands at 8 incidents over the trailing 12 months, against 21 in the prior 12-month period, a drop of 61.9%. That is the structural story in Cole right now. On the other side of the ledger, vandalism is up 71.9% year-over-year (55 vs. 32) and robbery has risen from 7 to 11 incidents, a 57.1% increase, though neither crossed the threshold for a one-month signal this briefing. Those two categories are worth watching if the trend continues into fall.
Notable signals 1
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 8 incidents — about 66% below the 24 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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through August 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 Cole compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month aggravated assault 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 aggravated assault levels.”
Marston
8 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Cole's 8.
Open page →North Park Hill
8 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Cole's 8.
Open page →Washington Park West
8 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Cole's 8.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Cole, 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.