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 categories moved in West Colfax this April — two one-month below-trend signals and one sustained structural shift. The structural pattern is downward across vehicle-related crime, with motor vehicle theft appearing in both a single-month drop and a longer-term sustained shift.
Motor vehicle theft is the clearest mover: the trailing 12-month total stands at 133, down 33.8% against the prior 12 months (201) and well below the multi-year baseline mean of 258.02. Theft from vehicle also ran below trend this month — 154 incidents over the current 12 months against 201 the year prior, a 23.4% decline. Everything else in the neighborhood, including burglary, robbery, and aggravated assault, fell within normal range.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 133 incidents — about 48% below the 258 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 154 incidents — about 38% below the 249 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 133, down 34% from 201 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 April 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
119 incidents over the past 12 months — 14 below West Colfax's 133.
Open page →Westwood
113 incidents over the past 12 months — 20 below West Colfax's 133.
Open page →East Colfax
111 incidents over the past 12 months — 22 below West Colfax's 133.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
West Colfaxdoesn'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 | 3 | — too few |
Each row shows West Colfax's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 4 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 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.