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.
Three categories ran below trend in Cory - Merrill this April, all on the property crime side. No spikes, no rare events — the month's shape is a broad, consistent downward move across the neighborhood's highest-volume crime types, backed by two zero-event signals as well.
Burglary is the most structural of the three drops: 23 incidents over the current 12 months against 44 in the prior year, a 47.7% decline and well below the multi-year baseline. Motor vehicle theft followed a similar arc — down 63.0% year-over-year, 10 incidents vs. 27. Theft from vehicle also ran below trend, off 15.9% against the prior 12 months. Robbery and vandalism moved the other direction — robbery up 77.8% and vandalism up 26.1% year-over-year — but neither generated a signal this month, meaning they remain within their expected ranges despite the volume increase.
Notable signals 3
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 23 incidents — about 51% below the 46 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 10 incidents — about 79% below the 47 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 37 incidents — about 54% below the 81 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 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
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.”
Marston
24 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Cory - Merrill's 23.
Open page →Montclair
24 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Cory - Merrill's 23.
Open page →Belcaro
21 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Cory - Merrill's 23.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Cory - Merrill has spiked other larceny historically (11 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 | 11 | 100% |
Each row shows Cory - Merrill'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 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.