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).
Four categories moved in Westwood this August, three single-month below-trend signals and one sustained structural shift. The overall shape is broadly downward across property and violent crime, with no spikes and no rare events in the mix.
Burglary, motor vehicle theft, and aggravated assault all ran below trend this month. Burglary is the strongest of the three, with the trailing 12-month total at 45 incidents against 56 in the prior year, down 19.6%. Motor vehicle theft shows the deepest 12-month move, 98 incidents versus 139 a year ago, a 29.5% decline. Other larceny, down 21.8% over the same window, carries the sustained-shift read, meaning the lower volume is a multi-month structural pattern rather than a single quiet month.
Notable signals 3
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 45 incidents — about 26% below the 60 average from prior years.
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 98 incidents — about 40% below the 164 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 55 incidents — about 31% 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.
- 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 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 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.