Sloan Lake Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Sloan Lake is a northwest neighborhood organized around the namesake 177-acre lake, between West 17th and West 26th Avenues. The lakefront and Sloan's Lake Park anchor the residential grid; the south edge along West Colfax has seen significant townhouse-and-mid-rise redevelopment around the former St. Anthony Hospital site.
Three categories ran below trend in Sloan Lake this August, all on the property crime side. Vandalism, motor vehicle theft, and theft from vehicle each registered below-trend signals this month, with no spikes or rare events in the mix. The directional tilt is consistently downward across the categories that drove the most volume in prior years.
The 12-month numbers support that picture. Motor vehicle theft is down 31.7% against the prior year, 43 incidents vs. 63. Vandalism is down 29.3%, from 75 to 53. Theft from vehicle has fallen 22.4%, from 98 to 76. Aggravated assault is the one category moving the other direction, up 30.0% over 12 months, though at 13 incidents it remains a low-volume category. Burglary, at 69 incidents, is essentially flat. Everything else was within range.
Notable signals 3
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 53 incidents — about 29% below the 74 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 43 incidents — about 51% below the 87 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 76 incidents — about 41% below the 129 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 Sloan Lake 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.”
Bear Valley
52 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Sloan Lake's 53.
Open page →Harvey Park South
52 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Sloan Lake's 53.
Open page →Cole
55 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Sloan Lake's 53.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Sloan Lake, 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.