Albany Park Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Albany Park is a Northwest Side neighborhood organized around Lawrence Avenue and the CTA Brown Line's Kimball terminus. Anchored by Eugene Field Park, the North Branch of the Chicago River along its southern edge, and a long commercial strip of small restaurants and storefronts on Lawrence and Kedzie.
March 2026 brought two signals in Albany Park, both concentrated in a single category: burglary ran below its monthly trend and simultaneously registered as a structural, multi-month sustained shift. The shape of the month is narrow but consistent — one category, two converging signals pointing the same direction.
Burglary is down 46.3% over the trailing 12 months — 44 incidents against 82 in the prior year — and the sustained-shift signal confirms this isn't a one-month fluctuation. Every other tracked category was within its normal range: robbery is down 35.4% on the year, vandalism down 17.8%, and other larceny down 15.3%, but none of those moves generated a signal this month.
Notable signals 1
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 44 incidents — about 54% below the 95 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 44, down 46% from 82 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 March 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.
Sexual Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Vandalism
How Albany Park 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.”
Washington Park
42 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Albany Park's 44.
Open page →Ashburn
41 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Albany Park's 44.
Open page →Morgan Park
47 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Albany Park's 44.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Albany Park, 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 SFPD's open dataset, mapped to 10 NIBRS-aligned categories, and aggregated to 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.