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 March — one single-month spike and two multi-year structural shifts running in opposite directions. The structural signals are the more consequential story: robbery is down and vandalism is up, both as sustained shifts, not just this month's noise.
Sexual assault is the spike, with 24 incidents in the current 12 months against 6 in the prior year — a 300.0% increase. Robbery has fallen 35.1% year-over-year, 61 incidents vs. 94, a sustained structural decline. Vandalism has moved the other way, up 52.5% to 154 incidents from 101 — also a sustained shift, not a single anomalous month. Everything else, including motor vehicle theft and other larceny, held within range.
Notable signals 1
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 24 incidents — about 305% above the 6 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.
- Vandalism is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 154, up 53% from 101 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 61, down 35% from 94 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 Armour Square compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month sexual assault 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 sexual assault levels.”
Washington Park
24 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Armour Square's 24.
Open page →Morgan Park
23 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Armour Square's 24.
Open page →Calumet Heights
22 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Armour Square's 24.
Open page →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 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.