DIA Crime Rate Trends — Denver
DIA covers the 53-square-mile Denver International Airport property in far-northeast Denver. The footprint is dominated by airport operations land — runways, terminal, support facilities — with effectively no residential population.
Three signals surfaced in DIA this April — one single-month spike and two sustained structural shifts. The shape of the month is not broadly quiet: aggravated assault is the dominant story, registering both a one-month spike and a multi-month structural shift upward, while motor vehicle theft has moved in the opposite direction over the same longer window.
Aggravated assault stands at 49 incidents over the current 12 months, up 88.5% against the prior-year 12-month total of 26 — a structural move, not a one-month blip. Motor vehicle theft has run the other way: 330 incidents in the current 12 months versus 557 in the prior period, down 40.8%. Burglary also fell sharply on a 12-month basis, down 31.9% (32 vs. 47), though it did not cross the signal threshold this month. Every other tracked category stayed within range.
Notable signals 1
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 49 incidents — about 56% above the 32 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 330, down 41% from 557 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Aggravated Assault is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 49, up 89% from 26 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
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
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 DIA 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.”
City Park West
51 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above DIA's 49.
Open page →Washington Virginia Vale
45 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below DIA's 49.
Open page →Globeville
41 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 below DIA's 49.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
DIAdoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Aggravated assault | 4 | — too few |
Each row shows DIA's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 1 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 DIA, 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.