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.
September 2026 was a quiet month for Albany Park. No tracked category crossed an anomaly threshold, and the signal count across all crime types came to zero. The story this month is not a single sharp move but a broad, sustained downward drift in volume across nearly every category.
Seven categories are running below their prior-year totals over the trailing 12 months. Vandalism is down 11.6% year over year, 258 incidents against 292. Motor vehicle theft fell 14.8%, from 142 to 121. Robbery dropped 15.2%, from 46 to 39. Sexual assault is the sole exception, up 20.7% against the prior year, 35 incidents versus 29, a relatively small count but the one category moving against the grain of an otherwise broad decline.
Notable signals 0
Nothing notable surfaced this month — every category sits within normal range against its baseline.
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 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.
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 other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
South Chicago
494 incidents over the past 12 months — 29 below Albany Park's 523.
Open page →Kenwood
561 incidents over the past 12 months — 38 above Albany Park's 523.
Open page →Near South Side
574 incidents over the past 12 months — 51 above Albany Park's 523.
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 CPD's open dataset on the City of Chicago Open Data portal — IUCR-coded and mapped to 9 UCR-aligned categories (theft from vehicle isn't reliably separable in the public feed and rolls into other larceny). Aggregated to community area × 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.