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.
Two signals surfaced in Cole this September, one below-trend and one a streak break, against an otherwise stable month. Aggravated assault ran below its recent pace, and arson reappeared after a long quiet gap. The rest of the tracked categories were within their normal ranges.
The aggravated assault drop is the more structurally significant of the two: the trailing 12 months show 10 incidents against 22 in the prior year, a 54.5% decline. The arson streak break is the sharper single-month signal, a category returning where it rarely appears. Robbery is the one category trending upward over the 12-month window, 13 incidents against 6 in the prior year, though it did not register a single-month signal this period.
Notable signals 2
Arson
First incident since May 2023 — a 3-year gap ended this month.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 10 incidents — about 58% 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 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 Cole compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month arson 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 arson levels.”
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.