South Park Hill Crime Rate Trends — Denver
South Park Hill is the southern third of Park Hill, between East 26th and East 17th Avenues along Colorado Boulevard. A walkable grid of pre-war bungalows and Denver Squares, with the Park Hill Golf Course historic site (now redeveloping) on its northern edge.
Three categories moved in South Park Hill this April — one single-month below-trend signal, one structural multi-year shift, and one streak break. The mix is not uniformly downward: burglary's sustained decline is the dominant structural story, but an arson reappearance cuts against an otherwise quiet backdrop.
Burglary has fallen 56.3% over the trailing 12 months — 38 incidents against 87 the prior year — a sustained shift that has been reshaping the neighborhood's property-crime profile for longer than a single month. Motor vehicle theft also ran below trend this period, down 61.7% year-over-year (18 vs. 47). Arson is the outlier: it registers as a streak break, meaning it has resurfaced after a long gap, and is the signal most worth watching even though the other two categories moved more dramatically.
Notable signals 2
Arson
First incident since May 2023 — a 3-year gap ended this month.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 18 incidents — about 75% below the 71 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 38, down 56% from 87 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 South Park Hill compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month arson 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 arson levels.”
Barnum West
1 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below South Park Hill's 1.
Open page →Bear Valley
1 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below South Park Hill's 1.
Open page →Berkeley
1 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below South Park Hill's 1.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When South Park Hill has spiked burglary historically (6 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 100% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Aggravated assault | 9 | 88.9% |
| Burglary | 6 | 100% |
Each row shows South Park Hill's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 8 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 South Park 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.