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.
August 2026 brought two distinct signals in University Hills, both concentrated in the same category. Other larceny produced the month's strongest single-month reading and also registers as a sustained structural shift, meaning the elevated volume is not just a one-month outlier but a pattern building across the trailing 12 months. Every other tracked category was within normal range.
Other larceny stands at 548 incidents over the current 12 months, up 30.5% against the prior year's 420. The sustained-shift signal reinforces that this is not noise: the volume has been running above the prior period for long enough to constitute a trend, not a single spike. Aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft both moved in the other direction over the same window, down 66.7% and 48.6% respectively, which makes the other-larceny climb the defining story of this neighborhood's August briefing.
Notable signals 1
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 548 incidents — about 211% above the 176 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 548, up 31% from 420 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 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 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
552 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above University Hills's 548.
Open page →Cherry Creek
502 incidents over the past 12 months — 46 below University Hills's 548.
Open page →CBD
462 incidents over the past 12 months — 86 below University Hills's 548.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
University Hillsdoesn'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 | 1 | — too few |
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.