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 moved in Sloan Lake this April — two one-month below-trend signals (motor vehicle theft and vandalism) plus a sustained structural shift in motor vehicle theft that points to a longer-term change, not just a single quiet month.
Motor vehicle theft is the clearest story: the trailing 12-month total is 45, down 39.2% against the prior year's 74, well below a multi-year baseline of roughly 88.98 annual incidents — making this a structural move, not noise. Vandalism also ran below trend this month, with the 12-month total at 55 against 70 the prior year, a 21.4% drop. Everything else — burglary, other larceny, theft from vehicle — was also down year-over-year but within a range that didn't cross any threshold this month.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 45 incidents — about 49% below the 89 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 55 incidents — about 26% below the 75 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 45, down 39% from 74 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 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.”
Congress Park
47 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Sloan Lake's 45.
Open page →Goldsmith
47 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Sloan Lake's 45.
Open page →Jefferson Park
47 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Sloan Lake's 45.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Sloan Lakedoesn'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 | 2 | — too few |
| Burglary | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Sloan Lake'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 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.