Ruby Hill Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Ruby Hill is a southwest neighborhood between Federal Boulevard and the South Platte, organized around Ruby Hill Park. The park itself is one of Denver's most popular sledding hills in winter and a summer concert venue; the surrounding streets are mid-century single-family residential.
August 2026 brought three distinct signals to Ruby Hill, each pointing in a different direction. Other larceny spiked, motor vehicle theft ran below trend, and arson surfaced as a streak break, its first appearance after a long quiet gap. The month is not broadly up or down: it is mixed, with categories moving independently rather than as part of a single structural pattern.
The other larceny spike is the sharpest of the three. The trailing 12-month total reached 71 incidents, up 26.8% against the prior 12 months (56 incidents). Motor vehicle theft moved the other way, 52 incidents over the current 12 months against 69 in the year before, a drop of 24.6%. The arson streak break is low-volume by nature but stands out precisely because the category had been absent; everything else across the seven tracked categories stayed within its recent range.
Notable signals 3
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 71 incidents — about 38% above the 51 average from prior years.
Arson
First incident since September 2023 — a 3-year gap ended this month.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 52 incidents — about 54% below the 113 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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through August 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 Ruby Hill 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.”
Cole
71 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Ruby Hill's 71.
Open page →City Park
70 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Ruby Hill's 71.
Open page →Harvey Park South
73 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Ruby Hill's 71.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Ruby Hilldoesn'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 |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Ruby Hill's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 7 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 Ruby Hill, 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.