East Colfax Crime Rate Trends — Denver
East Colfax is a far-east residential neighborhood organized along the East Colfax Avenue commercial corridor, between Monaco Parkway and Yosemite Street at the Aurora city line. The Colfax strip carries motels, small restaurants, and a long-running mix of independent retail; the surrounding side streets are mid-century single-family residential.
Four categories moved in East Colfax this August: one spike, one below-trend drop, and two sustained multi-month structural shifts. The overall picture is mixed rather than uniformly improving or worsening, with property crime pulling in opposite directions across the tracked categories.
Other larceny is the sharpest signal this month, a single-month spike against a backdrop of 171 incidents in the trailing 12 months, up 23.9% from 138 the prior year. Motor vehicle theft ran below trend this month, and burglary is in a sustained structural decline, down 30.8% year-over-year (83 incidents vs. 120). Aggravated assault and vandalism both edged above their prior-year totals, 3.7% and 6.8% respectively, but neither crossed an anomaly threshold.
Notable signals 2
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 171 incidents — about 56% above the 110 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 87 incidents — about 63% below the 234 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 87, down 37% from 139 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 83, down 31% from 120 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 August 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 East Colfax compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
College View - South Platte
170 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below East Colfax's 171.
Open page →City Park West
168 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below East Colfax's 171.
Open page →Hale
177 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 above East Colfax's 171.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
East Colfaxdoesn'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 |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows East Colfax's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 5 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 East Colfax, 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.