Mar Lee Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Mar Lee is a small southwest neighborhood between Federal Boulevard and Sheridan, just south of Mississippi Avenue. Predominantly mid-century single-family residential with Mar Lee Park as its namesake green space.
Four signals moved in Mar Lee this April — one spike, one drop, and two sustained shifts. The structural story is a split: other larceny has run well above its historical baseline across multiple months while motor vehicle theft continues a long decline, and those two trends are pulling the neighborhood's property crime picture in opposite directions.
Other larceny is the most prominent signal, with 181 incidents in the current 12-month window against a baseline of 65.34 — a 277.1% increase over the prior 12 months. Motor vehicle theft moved the other way, down 49.2% year-over-year (62 incidents vs. 122). Burglary and vandalism are also running below their prior-year levels — down 16.2% and 17.3% respectively — but neither crossed the anomaly threshold this month.
Notable signals 2
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 181 incidents — about 177% above the 65 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 62 incidents — about 51% below the 127 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.
- Other Larceny is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 181, up 277% from 48 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 62, down 49% from 122 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 Mar Lee 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.”
Lowry Field
180 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Mar Lee's 181.
Open page →Montbello
186 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Mar Lee's 181.
Open page →Hampden
171 incidents over the past 12 months — 10 below Mar Lee's 181.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Mar Lee has spiked other larceny historically (8 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 | 8 | 100% |
Each row shows Mar Lee'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 Mar Lee, 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.