Highland Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Highland (often called LoHi for Lower Highland on the south end) is the dense northwest neighborhood across the South Platte from downtown, climbing the hill above 15th Street and Speer. The 32nd Avenue and Tennyson commercial strips run through Highland's older residential grid of late-1800s bungalows, Denver Squares, and a wave of newer infill.
Four categories moved in Highland this September, two single-month below-trend signals and two sustained multi-month structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward across property crime, with no spikes and no rare events in the mix.
Vandalism and theft from vehicle both ran below trend this month. Burglary is the more structural story: 68 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 116 in the prior year, down 41.4%, a move that has persisted long enough to register as a sustained shift rather than a single quiet month. Aggravated assault follows a similar arc, 20 incidents against 28, down 28.6% year over year. Other larceny is the one category moving against the grain, up 13.7% on a 12-month basis, 282 incidents against 248.
Notable signals 2
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 105 incidents — about 35% below the 161 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 161 incidents — about 40% below the 267 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 68, down 41% from 116 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 105, down 29% from 148 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 Highland compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month vandalism 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 vandalism levels.”
City Park West
103 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Highland's 105.
Open page →Westwood
100 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Highland's 105.
Open page →Hampden South
113 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 above Highland's 105.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Highland, 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.