Hampden Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Hampden is a southeast residential neighborhood organized around East Hampden Avenue, between Holly Street and Interstate 25. Predominantly mid-century single-family with apartment-building corridors along Hampden itself.
Four categories moved in Hampden this September, a mix of two below-trend signals, one spike, and one sustained structural shift. The headline is aggravated assault, which registered an above-trend spike against an otherwise property-crime-focused briefing. Motor vehicle theft and burglary both ran below trend, pulling in the opposite direction.
Motor vehicle theft is down 50.0% over the trailing 12 months, 98 incidents against 196 in the prior year, the sharpest year-over-year move in the neighborhood. Burglary is also lower, off 32.1% to 38 incidents from 56. Against those declines, aggravated assault has climbed to 62 incidents in the current 12 months, up 29.2% from 48, and the spike signal this month reflects that the pace of incidents is running above its multi-year level. The remaining categories, robbery, theft from vehicle, other larceny, and vandalism, were within normal range.
Notable signals 3
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 62 incidents — about 25% above the 50 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 98 incidents — about 72% below the 345 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 38 incidents — about 63% below the 101 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 98, down 50% from 196 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
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 Hampden 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.”
North Capitol Hill
62 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Hampden's 62.
Open page →West Colfax
61 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Hampden's 62.
Open page →Westwood
58 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below Hampden's 62.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Hampdendoesn'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 | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Hampden'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 Hampden, 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.