West Colfax Crime Rate Trends — Denver
West Colfax is a west-Denver neighborhood organized along the West Colfax Avenue corridor between Federal Boulevard and Sheridan. The Colfax strip carries motels, small restaurants, and a long-running mix of independent retail; the surrounding side streets are early-20th-century working-class residential plus the recent redevelopment of the former St. Anthony Hospital site at Sloan's Lake.
West Colfax had four signals in June 2026 — two one-month below-trend readings and two sustained structural shifts. The shape of the month is broadly downward across vehicle-related property crime, with no spikes or rare events anywhere in the mix.
Motor Vehicle Theft is the sharpest single-month signal: the trailing 12-month total of 125 sits well below the multi-year baseline of 253.49, and the category is also down 31.3% against the prior 12 months. Theft from Vehicle appears twice in the top signals — a one-month drop and a sustained structural shift — with the 12-month total at 135 against 200 the year before, a 32.5% decline. Burglary and Aggravated Assault also ran lower year-over-year (down 20.1% and 20.8%, respectively), while Robbery edged 13.6% above its prior-year count — the one category moving against the broader downward trend.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 125 incidents — about 51% below the 253 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 135 incidents — about 45% below the 245 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.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 135, down 33% from 200 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 125, down 31% from 182 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 June 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 West Colfax compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
East Colfax
109 incidents over the past 12 months — 16 below West Colfax's 125.
Open page →Westwood
107 incidents over the past 12 months — 18 below West Colfax's 125.
Open page →Hampden
104 incidents over the past 12 months — 21 below West Colfax's 125.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for West Colfax, 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.