Sun Valley Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Sun Valley is a small west-Denver neighborhood between Interstate 25 and Federal Boulevard, just south of Mile High Stadium (Empower Field). Predominantly working-class residential with a long history of public housing and now several large redevelopment projects, plus the stadium and the Decatur-Federal RTD station.
Sun Valley's September 2026 briefing is defined by a single notable signal: motor vehicle theft running well below its recent pace. With only one tracked signal this month, the story is narrow, but the backdrop is more complex. Several categories are moving in opposite directions across the trailing 12 months, making this a mixed structural picture rather than a broadly improving or worsening one.
Motor vehicle theft stands at 24 incidents over the current 12 months, down from 45 in the prior year, a 46.7% reduction. That is the clearest move in the data. Elsewhere, burglary has risen sharply, 36 incidents against 12 in the prior 12 months, a 200.0% increase, and theft from vehicle is up 55.9% (53 vs 34). Robbery runs in the opposite direction, 12 incidents versus 20 a year ago, down 40.0%. The one-month signal picture is quiet, but the 12-month category trends are pulling in multiple directions.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 24 incidents — about 57% below the 55 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 September 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 Sun Valley 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.”
Whittier
24 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Sun Valley's 24.
Open page →Chaffee Park
23 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Sun Valley's 24.
Open page →Clayton
25 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Sun Valley's 24.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Sun Valley, 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.