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 August, three as single-month below-trend signals and one as a sustained multi-month structural shift. The overall shape is broadly downward across both violent and property crime, with no spikes or rare events anywhere in the mix.
Motor vehicle theft is the strongest signal: the trailing 12 months came in at 62 incidents against 96 in the prior year, down 35.4%. Aggravated assault fell even more sharply over the same window, 14 incidents versus 30 a year ago, a 53.3% decline. Robbery also ran below trend this month, with the 12-month total at 7 against 10 the prior year. Theft from vehicle is the one category moving the other direction, up 9.6% year over year, but it did not cross an anomaly threshold this month, leaving the rest of the signal mix uniformly downward.
Notable signals 3
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 62 incidents — about 51% below the 126 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 14 incidents — about 54% below the 31 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 7 incidents — about 67% 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 62, down 35% from 96 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 August 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.”
Bear Valley
63 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Sunnyside's 62.
Open page →City Park West
61 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Sunnyside's 62.
Open page →Virginia Village
60 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Sunnyside's 62.
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.