Sunnyside Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Sunnyside is a northwest neighborhood between West 38th and West 48th Avenues, just east of Federal Boulevard. A walkable grid of bungalows and Denver Squares anchored by the Tejon Street and West 44th Avenue commercial strips, with the Highlands neighborhood immediately to its south.
Five categories moved in Sunnyside this September, three below-trend single-month drops and two sustained multi-month structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward across property and violent crime, with no spikes or rare events in the mix.
Motor vehicle theft is the strongest signal: 61 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 93 in the year before, a 34.4% reduction. Aggravated assault has fallen even further on a percentage basis, 13 incidents this year against 28 prior, down 53.6%. Robbery edged up slightly, 7 incidents against 6, but the two sustained-shift signals in the data point to structural improvement that has built over multiple months, not just a quiet September.
Notable signals 3
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 61 incidents — about 51% below the 125 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 13 incidents — about 58% below the 31 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 7 incidents — about 66% below the 21 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 50, down 46% from 92 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 61, down 34% from 93 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 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 Sunnyside 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.”
City Park West
61 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Sunnyside's 61.
Open page →Union Station
60 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Sunnyside's 61.
Open page →Mar Lee
63 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Sunnyside's 61.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Sunnyside, 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.