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.
Five categories moved in East Colfax this April — three ran below trend, one registered a single-month spike, and one reflects a sustained structural shift. The dominant directional story is downward across property and violent crime, with the other-larceny spike as the main counterweight.
Robbery and Vandalism both came in below trend this month, consistent with robbery's 12-month total of 36 against 55 the prior year — down 34.5% — and vandalism at 117 vs. 142, down 17.6%. Other Larceny is the exception: its 12-month total of 140 runs above a baseline of 107.73, the one category moving against the broader downward pattern in the neighborhood.
Notable signals 4
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 140 incidents — about 30% above the 108 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 36 incidents — about 26% below the 48 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 117 incidents — about 31% below the 169 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 111 incidents — about 55% below the 245 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 111, down 29% from 157 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 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 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.”
University
140 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below East Colfax's 140.
Open page →Cheesman Park
138 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below East Colfax's 140.
Open page →Berkeley
137 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below East Colfax's 140.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When East Colfax has spiked other larceny historically (12 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 | 12 | 100% |
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.