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).
Two categories moved in University Park in August 2026, one below trend and one returning after a long absence. The headline is not volume but pattern: an arson streak-break is the more structurally unusual of the two signals, marking the first appearance of that category after an extended quiet gap. Vandalism ran below its single-month trend line alongside it.
Vandalism is down 38.6% over the trailing 12 months, 27 incidents against 44 in the prior year, the sharpest year-over-year drop among tracked categories in the neighborhood. Theft from vehicle and motor vehicle theft are also well below prior-year levels, off 32.4% and 25.8% respectively. Other larceny is the one category moving the other direction, up 14.1% year-over-year, 105 incidents against 92. Everything else in the August snapshot fell within normal range.
Notable signals 2
Arson
First incident since June 2023 — a 3-year gap ended this month.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 27 incidents — about 63% below the 73 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 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 Park compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month arson 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 arson levels.”
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.