University Park Crime Rate Trends — Denver
University Park is a small south-central neighborhood immediately east of the University of Denver campus, between Evans and Yale Avenues. A walkable grid of pre-war and mid-century homes anchored by the Old South Gaylord shopping district and Observatory Park (containing DU's historic Chamberlin Observatory).
April 2026 brought two below-trend signals in University Park — motor vehicle theft and vandalism — against a broader backdrop that is structurally downward across most property categories. The month was narrow in scope: two tracked signals, no spikes, no rare events.
Motor vehicle theft is the more pronounced move, with the current 12-month total at 29 against a baseline mean of 94.1 — and down 21.6% year-over-year from 37 to 29. Vandalism follows a similar line, off 30.6% over the same period (34 vs. 49). The rest of the tracked categories held within range, though other larceny is the one counter-trend: up 30.1% year-over-year, 108 incidents against 83 in the prior 12 months.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 29 incidents — about 69% below the 94 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 34 incidents — about 56% below the 76 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 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 Park 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.”
Hilltop
29 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below University Park's 29.
Open page →Platt Park
29 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below University Park's 29.
Open page →Cherry Creek
28 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below University Park's 29.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for University Park, 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.