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.
Three signals surfaced in West Colfax this September: two single-month below-trend moves and one sustained multi-month structural shift. All three point in the same direction, motor vehicle theft and theft from vehicle both running below recent norms, with motor vehicle theft also registering as a longer-term structural decline rather than a one-month dip.
Motor vehicle theft is the strongest signal: the trailing 12-month total stands at 116, down 32.6% against the prior 12 months (172). Theft from vehicle follows a similar arc, 146 incidents over the current 12 months versus 182 the year before, a 19.8% decline. Burglary also trended lower, off 12.6% year over year, while robbery moved the other way, 25 incidents in the current 12 months against 19 in the prior period, a 31.6% rise on a small base. Everything else, aggravated assault, other larceny, and vandalism, remained within a narrow range of the prior year.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 116 incidents — about 53% below the 247 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 146 incidents — about 39% below the 241 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 116, down 33% from 172 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
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.”
Hampden
98 incidents over the past 12 months — 18 below West Colfax's 116.
Open page →Westwood
98 incidents over the past 12 months — 18 below West Colfax's 116.
Open page →North Capitol Hill
93 incidents over the past 12 months — 23 below West Colfax's 116.
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.