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.
Four categories moved in Sunnyside this June — three one-month below-trend signals and one sustained structural shift. The dominant direction is downward: motor vehicle theft, robbery, and aggravated assault all ran below trend in the same month, a concentrated drop across the crime types that typically drive the neighborhood's most serious incident counts.
Motor vehicle theft is the sharpest single signal: the trailing 12-month total of 68 sits well below a multi-year baseline mean of 127.19 incidents, and down 33.3% against the prior 12 months (102 to 68). Robbery and aggravated assault follow similar trajectories — down 45.5% and 43.3% year-over-year, respectively. Theft from vehicle and other larceny were the exceptions, each edging modestly above the prior year, but neither generated a signal given the overall volume levels.
Notable signals 3
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 68 incidents — about 47% below the 127 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 6 incidents — about 73% below the 22 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 17 incidents — about 45% below the 31 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 68, down 33% from 102 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 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
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.”
Baker
69 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Sunnyside's 68.
Open page →Union Station
69 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Sunnyside's 68.
Open page →CBD
70 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Sunnyside's 68.
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.