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 surfaced in Cory - Merrill this September, and they are structurally different. The more unusual is a rare arson event, a category that almost never appears in this neighborhood, logging a single incident this month. The other is a sustained shift in other larceny, a multi-month structural decline rather than a single quiet month.
Other larceny is down 44.1% over the trailing 12 months, 166 incidents against 297 in the prior year, the largest year-over-year move among tracked categories here. Motor vehicle theft is also well below its prior-year pace, 8 incidents against 21, a 61.9% drop, and theft from vehicle fell 19.0%. Robbery is the one category trending upward, 14 incidents in the current 12 months against 9 in the year before, a 55.6% increase on a small base. The overall shape of September in Cory - Merrill is broadly downward across property crime, with the arson rare event as the outlier to watch.
Notable signals 1
Arson
1 incident in the past 90 days. No prior occurrence in the analysis window.
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 166, down 44% from 297 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 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
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 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 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.