West Highland Crime Rate Trends — Denver
West Highland is the western half of the broader Highlands area, organized around West 32nd Avenue and Tennyson Street. The Tennyson and 32nd commercial strips anchor a residential grid of bungalows, Denver Squares, and recent infill.
August 2026 produced a single notable signal in West Highland: a below-trend month for vandalism. Every other tracked category ran within its normal range, making this one of the quieter briefings of the year.
Vandalism is down 37.2% against the prior 12 months, 49 incidents in the current period against 78 in the year before. That decline is the sharpest year-over-year move across any category in the neighborhood. Robbery and motor vehicle theft are also down substantially over the trailing 12 months, 50.0% and 30.4% respectively, and aggravated assault has fallen 30.0%, but none of those registered a single-month signal this period. The structural picture across property and violent crime in West Highland is broadly downward.
Notable signals 1
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 49 incidents — about 39% below the 80 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 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 Highland compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month vandalism 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 vandalism levels.”
Athmar Park
48 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below West Highland's 49.
Open page →Clayton
48 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below West Highland's 49.
Open page →Bear Valley
52 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above West Highland's 49.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for West Highland, 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.