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 signals surfaced in Sloan Lake this June — two one-month below-trend readings and one sustained structural shift. The shape is largely downward, with motor vehicle theft driving the most prominent moves and vandalism adding a second below-trend reading alongside it.
Motor vehicle theft logged 44 incidents over the current 12 months against a baseline mean of 88.26 — down 43.6% from the prior year's 78. That's not a single quiet month; the sustained-shift signal confirms the decline has been building across multiple periods. Vandalism followed a similar trajectory, falling 31.6% year-over-year to 52 incidents from 76. The rest of the tracked categories — theft from vehicle, other larceny, burglary — stayed within range, with no spikes and no rare-event signals this briefing.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 44 incidents — about 50% below the 88 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 52 incidents — about 30% below the 74 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 44, down 44% from 78 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 June 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 motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Cole
43 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Sloan Lake's 44.
Open page →Fort Logan
45 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Sloan Lake's 44.
Open page →Congress Park
42 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Sloan Lake's 44.
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.