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.
Two categories ran below trend in Washington Virginia Vale this September, both on the property crime side. Burglary and motor vehicle theft are the signals this month, and the broader 12-month picture reinforces the pattern: this is a neighborhood where multiple property categories have been declining in parallel, not just posting a quiet month.
Burglary sits at 64 incidents over the trailing 12 months, down from 87 in the prior year, a drop of 26.4%. Motor vehicle theft fell further still, 74 incidents against 106 in the year before, down 30.2%. Vandalism is the counterweight: 115 incidents in the current 12 months against 91 prior, up 26.4%, and the one category moving in the opposite direction from the rest of the neighborhood's trend.
Notable signals 2
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 64 incidents — about 30% below the 91 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 74 incidents — about 68% below the 234 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 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
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 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.”
Civic Center
63 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Washington Virginia Vale's 64.
Open page →Highland
68 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Washington Virginia Vale's 64.
Open page →Montbello
68 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Washington Virginia Vale's 64.
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.