University Hills Crime Rate Trends — Denver
University Hills is a south Denver neighborhood between Yale Avenue and Hampden Avenue, organized around University Hills Plaza and South Colorado Boulevard. Predominantly mid-century single-family residential with the namesake shopping center and apartment-building corridors along Colorado.
University Hills had two tracked signals in April 2026, both concentrated in other larceny. The month's shape is narrow: a single-month spike and a sustained structural shift in the same category, plus a zero-event signal, against an otherwise unremarkable backdrop across the remaining five tracked categories.
Other larceny is the category doing all the work. The trailing 12 months logged 530 incidents — up 48.0% against the prior 12 months' 358, and well above the multi-year baseline of 155.27 annual incidents. Robbery and burglary are both running lower year-over-year (down 42.9% and 29.4% respectively), and theft from vehicle is flat at 73 incidents in each period. The other larceny move is structural, not noise: the sustained-shift signal means the elevated volume has persisted across multiple months, not just April.
Notable signals 1
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 530 incidents — about 241% above the 155 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 is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 530, up 48% from 358 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
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
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 Hills 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.”
DIA
574 incidents over the past 12 months — 44 above University Hills's 530.
Open page →CBD
442 incidents over the past 12 months — 88 below University Hills's 530.
Open page →Cherry Creek
431 incidents over the past 12 months — 99 below University Hills's 530.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When University Hills has spiked other larceny historically (16 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 75% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 16 | 75% |
Each row shows University Hills's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 8 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 Hills, 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.