Marston Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Marston is a far-southwest Denver neighborhood organized around Marston Lake (a Denver Water reservoir) and West Bowles Avenue. Predominantly low-density residential single-family, transitioning to suburban-style cul-de-sacs at the city's southwestern edge.
Two signals surfaced in Marston this September, both centered on theft from vehicle. One is a single-month below-trend reading; the other reflects a structural shift that has been building across the trailing 12 months. Together they point to a category that has moved well below its historical pace, not just in one quiet month but over a sustained period.
Theft from vehicle sits at 49 incidents over the current 12 months, down from 89 in the prior 12-month window, a 44.9% reduction year over year. The rest of the tracked categories are broadly consistent with prior-year levels or lower: burglary is down 33.3% (18 vs 27), aggravated assault down 42.9% (8 vs 14), and vandalism down 25.0% (36 vs 48). Other larceny is the one category holding flat at 74 incidents in both periods. Everything outside theft from vehicle stayed within range this month.
Notable signals 1
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 49 incidents — about 50% below the 97 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.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 49, down 45% from 89 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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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 Marston compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month theft from vehicle 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 theft from vehicle levels.”
Villa Park
49 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Marston's 49.
Open page →Harvey Park
50 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Marston's 49.
Open page →Harvey Park South
51 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Marston's 49.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Marston, 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.