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.
Four tracked signals surfaced in West Colfax this August: two one-month below-trend moves and two sustained multi-month shifts. The structural story is property crime running well under prior-year levels, with the sustained shifts confirming this is not simply a quiet month but a longer repositioning downward.
Motor vehicle theft is the strongest signal, down 31.6% over the trailing 12 months, 121 incidents against 177 in the prior year. Theft from vehicle appears twice in the top signals, once as a single-month drop and once as a sustained shift, consistent with its 28.9% year-over-year decline, 135 incidents against 190. Burglary also ran 19.1% below the prior 12 months. Everything else, robbery, aggravated assault, vandalism, and other larceny, moved within a narrower range and did not cross the anomaly threshold.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 121 incidents — about 51% below the 249 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 135 incidents — about 44% below the 242 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 121, down 32% from 177 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 135, down 29% from 190 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 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
101 incidents over the past 12 months — 20 below West Colfax's 121.
Open page →North Capitol Hill
99 incidents over the past 12 months — 22 below West Colfax's 121.
Open page →Westwood
98 incidents over the past 12 months — 23 below West Colfax's 121.
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.