Westwood Crime Rate Trends — Denver
Westwood is a southwest Denver neighborhood between Federal Boulevard and Sheridan, organized around Morrison Road. Predominantly working-class single-family residential with a strong Latinx cultural presence along the Morrison Road business corridor (BuCu West).
Three categories moved in Westwood this September, two one-month below-trend signals and one sustained structural shift. The shape is broadly downward: property crime categories are pulling back across both single-month and multi-year timeframes, with motor vehicle theft appearing in both the drop and sustained-shift signals.
Burglary is the strongest single-month signal, with 44 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 56 in the year before, a decline of 21.4%. Motor vehicle theft reinforces the picture: down 29.5% year-over-year (98 vs. 139), and the sustained-shift signal indicates this is not just a quiet patch but a multi-month structural move. Other categories, including aggravated assault, down 19.4%, and other larceny, down 29.7%, stayed within range this month but add to a consistently downward backdrop. Vandalism, up 12.4% to 100 incidents, is the one counter-trend in the data.
Notable signals 2
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 44 incidents — about 27% below the 60 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 98 incidents — about 40% below the 163 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 98, down 30% from 139 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 Westwood compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month burglary 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 burglary levels.”
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Westwood, 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.