Cory - Merrill Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Cory - Merrill is a south Denver residential neighborhood between Washington Park and University Hills, named for the two elementary schools (Cory and Merrill Middle) that anchor it. Predominantly single-family mid-century homes on quiet residential streets, bordered by University Boulevard on the east.
Two signals moved in Cory - Merrill this June — one drop and one sustained shift — against a backdrop of two zero-event categories and everything else within range. The structural direction is broadly downward across property crime, with no spikes and no rare events in the mix.
Burglary is the month's most prominent signal: 23 incidents in the current 12-month window against a baseline of 46.4, and down 47.7% from the prior year's 44. Other larceny has moved in the same direction over a longer arc — 205 incidents this year versus 291 the year before, a 29.6% 12-month decline that qualifies as a sustained shift rather than a single quiet month. Robbery is the one counter-trend: 17 incidents against 7 in the prior year, a 142.9% increase on small base counts, though it generated no signal in this briefing's threshold counts.
Notable signals 1
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 23 incidents — about 50% below the 46 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 has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 205, down 30% from 291 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 June 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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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 Cory - Merrill compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month burglary 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 burglary levels.”
North Park Hill
23 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Cory - Merrill's 23.
Open page →Barnum West
22 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Cory - Merrill's 23.
Open page →Marston
21 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Cory - Merrill's 23.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Cory - Merrill, 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.