Armour Square Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Armour Square is a Near South Side community area that includes Chinatown's Wentworth Avenue commercial strip and the Guaranteed Rate Field stadium grounds. Named for Philip Armour and the meatpacking industry that once dominated the area; bordered by the Dan Ryan Expressway to the west and the South Branch of the Chicago River to the east.
Three categories moved in Armour Square this September: one single-month spike and two sustained structural shifts. The dominant story is other larceny, which is both the sharpest one-month signal and the engine of a longer-running structural increase. Robbery is running in the opposite direction, a multi-month structural decline that has held across the trailing 12 months.
Other larceny now stands at 424 incidents over the current 12-month window, up 46.7% against the prior year's 289. That gap is the largest year-over-year move in the neighborhood's tracked categories this briefing. Robbery, by contrast, is down 45.6% over the same window, 43 incidents against 79 in the prior 12 months, the steepest improvement across any category here.
Notable signals 1
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 424 incidents — about 64% above the 259 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.
- Other Larceny is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 424, up 47% from 289 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 43, down 46% from 79 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.
Sexual Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Vandalism
How Armour Square 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.”
Ohare
428 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Armour Square's 424.
Open page →West Lawn
428 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Armour Square's 424.
Open page →Brighton Park
418 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 below Armour Square's 424.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Armour Squaredoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Armour Square's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 7 adjacent neighborhoods spiked the same category within the next 3 months. A high same-category rate suggests a shock that travels (e.g. theft crews moving across Chicago); a low rate means spikes here tend to be local to the neighborhood. Categories with fewer than 5 historical spike events are listed but their rates are suppressed.
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Armour Square, 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.