University Crime Rate Trends — Denver
University is the south-central Denver neighborhood organized around the University of Denver campus, between South University Boulevard and South Colorado Boulevard. The campus dominates the geography; the surrounding streets are a mix of student housing, mid-century single-family homes, and the Asbury and Evans Avenue commercial strips.
June 2026 in University produced two signals moving in opposite directions — an other-larceny spike and a motor vehicle theft drop — against an otherwise within-range month across all seven tracked categories.
Other larceny is the sharper of the two signals: the trailing 12-month total of 143 incidents sits well above the 90.56 baseline mean, and the category is up 11.7% against the prior year's 128 incidents. Motor vehicle theft moved the other way — down 45.7% year-over-year, 25 incidents against 46 in the prior 12 months. Burglary and theft from vehicle also continued multi-year declines (down 29.7% and 32.5% respectively), though neither crossed a signal threshold this month; everything else held close to prior-year levels.
Notable signals 2
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 143 incidents — about 58% above the 91 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 25 incidents — about 70% below the 84 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
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 University compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
Northeast Park Hill
142 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below University's 143.
Open page →Berkeley
140 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below University's 143.
Open page →Washington Virginia Vale
150 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 above University's 143.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Universitydoesn'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 |
Each row shows University's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 7 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 University, 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.