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.
Three signals moved in Sun Valley this April — one single-month below-trend reading and two sustained structural shifts. The structural pattern points consistently downward: motor vehicle theft and other larceny are both running materially below their multi-year baselines, and the single-month drop in motor vehicle theft reinforces that the longer trend is real, not noise.
Motor vehicle theft is down 48.1% against the prior 12 months, 28 incidents versus 54 — well below the multi-year baseline of 54.37. Other larceny tells a similar story: 46 incidents in the current 12 months against 87 in the prior year, a 47.1% decrease, and classified as a sustained shift rather than a one-month dip. Aggravated assault has also pulled back sharply — down 46.2% year-over-year, 21 incidents versus 39 — though it sits outside the top three signals this month. Everything else, including robbery and theft from vehicle, was within its normal range.
Notable signals 1
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 28 incidents — about 49% below the 54 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.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 46, down 47% from 87 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 28, down 48% from 54 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
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.”
Cherry Creek
28 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Sun Valley's 28.
Open page →Clayton
27 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Sun Valley's 28.
Open page →Hilltop
29 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Sun Valley's 28.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Sun Valleydoesn'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 |
| Vandalism | 2 | — too few |
| Robbery | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Sun Valley's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 9 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 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.