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 June 2026 briefing is a single-signal month. One category moved across all tracked crime types — motor vehicle theft ran below trend — and every other category landed within its expected range.
Motor vehicle theft is the structural story here: the current 12-month total is 30 incidents against a baseline mean of 56, and down 37.5% against the prior 12-month period of 48. Burglary and theft from vehicle both trended upward year-over-year — 64.7% and 25.0% respectively — but neither crossed the anomaly threshold this month, meaning those moves are present in the annual totals without generating a single-month signal. Robbery and aggravated assault continued their multi-year declines, at -47.6% and -40.0% against prior-year counts.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 30 incidents — about 46% below the 56 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 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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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.”
Berkeley
31 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Sun Valley's 30.
Open page →Chaffee Park
31 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Sun Valley's 30.
Open page →Cherry Creek
31 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Sun Valley's 30.
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.