Villa Park Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Villa Park is a west-Denver neighborhood between West Colfax and West 6th Avenue, organized around Villa Park itself. Predominantly mid-century single-family residential bordered by Lakewood at Sheridan Boulevard.
Four categories moved in Villa Park this August, three registering single-month below-trend signals and one pointing to a longer structural shift. The overall shape is broadly downward across both violent and property crime, with no spikes and no rare-event signals this month.
Aggravated assault is the strongest signal, down 40.0% over the trailing 12 months, 21 incidents against 35 in the prior year. Motor vehicle theft and theft from vehicle both ran below trend as well, with motor vehicle theft down 46.0% year-over-year, 54 incidents against 100. The sustained shift in the mix suggests this is not just a quiet month; the declines across these categories are holding across a longer window.
Notable signals 3
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 21 incidents — about 51% below the 43 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 54 incidents — about 60% below the 134 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 51 incidents — about 52% below the 106 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 54, down 46% from 100 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
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 Villa Park compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month aggravated assault 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 aggravated assault levels.”
Lowry Field
21 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Villa Park's 21.
Open page →Cheesman Park
20 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Villa Park's 21.
Open page →Overland
20 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Villa Park's 21.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Villa 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.