Washington Virginia Vale Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Washington Virginia Vale is a southeast Denver neighborhood between East Alameda and East Mississippi Avenue, organized around Cherry Creek (the natural creek, not the shopping district) and the bike trail. Predominantly mid-century single-family residential with apartment buildings along Leetsdale Drive.
Four categories moved in Washington Virginia Vale this August, a mixed month with two below-trend drops, one spike, and one sustained structural shift. The strongest signal is other larceny, which ran above trend while burglary and motor vehicle theft both came in below. The overall shape is split: property crime is broadly down on a 12-month basis, but larceny-related categories are pulling in the opposite direction.
Burglary has fallen to 61 incidents over the trailing 12 months, down from 91 in the prior year, a 33.0% decline. Motor vehicle theft followed a similar path, 75 incidents against 121 in the prior year, down 38.0%. Other larceny moved the other way, reaching 145 incidents against 135 in the prior year, a 7.4% rise and the category's strongest recent signal. Everything else, including robbery, aggravated assault, theft from vehicle, and vandalism, fell within ranges that didn't cross the anomaly threshold this month.
Notable signals 3
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 145 incidents — about 19% above the 122 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 61 incidents — about 33% below the 91 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 75 incidents — about 68% below the 237 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 75, down 38% from 121 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 Washington Virginia Vale 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.”
Hampden South
145 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Washington Virginia Vale's 145.
Open page →University
145 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Washington Virginia Vale's 145.
Open page →Berkeley
142 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Washington Virginia Vale's 145.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Washington Virginia Valedoesn'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 Washington Virginia Vale's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 5 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 Washington Virginia Vale, 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.