Washington Park Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Washington Park is the dense south-Denver residential neighborhood surrounding the eponymous 165-acre park, one of the city's signature public spaces. Pre-war Denver Squares, bungalows, and a walkable grid line the park's perimeter, with the Old South Gaylord and South Pearl commercial strips on either side.
Washington Park's September 2026 briefing is narrow by signal count but pointed in direction: two of the three signals are burglary, one a single-month below-trend move and one a sustained multi-month structural shift downward. The third signal is a zero-event category, meaning one tracked crime type recorded no incidents at all this period. The overall shape is a neighborhood where most categories are quiet, and burglary is driving the story almost entirely on its own.
Burglary has fallen sharply over the trailing 12 months, 25 incidents against 52 in the prior year, a 51.9% decline. That drop is large enough to register as both a one-month signal and a structural shift, suggesting the move predates September and has been building across multiple periods. Theft from vehicle and vandalism are the categories pulling the other direction, up 14.9% and 17.9% respectively on a 12-month basis, though neither triggered a signal this month. Everything else, including aggravated assault and other larceny, ran below prior-year levels without crossing into signal territory.
Notable signals 1
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 25 incidents — about 45% below the 46 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 25, down 52% from 52 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 September 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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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 Washington Park compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month burglary 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 burglary levels.”
Southmoor Park
25 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Washington Park's 25.
Open page →Whittier
25 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Washington Park's 25.
Open page →Bear Valley
24 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Washington Park's 25.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Washington 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.