Ashburn Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Ashburn is a Southwest Side residential neighborhood between Western Avenue and Cicero Avenue, anchored by the 79th Street commercial corridor. Predominantly mid-century single-family bungalows and ranch homes, with Bogan High School and Wrightwood Park as community anchors.
September 2026 produced a single notable signal in Ashburn: a spike in sexual assault. Every other tracked category either held within its normal range or continued a longer downward trend. The month's overall shape is calm, with one category pulling against an otherwise broadly declining backdrop.
Sexual assault reached 35 incidents over the trailing 12 months, up from 30 in the prior year, a 16.7% increase and the one category that registered above trend. Aggravated assault and burglary both continued moving in the other direction, down 23.7% and 17.5% respectively against prior-year totals, and homicide fell from 5 to 1 over the same window. The rest of the tracked categories, robbery, other larceny, motor vehicle theft, and vandalism, each shifted less than 12% year over year and generated no anomalous signals this month.
Notable signals 1
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 35 incidents — about 85% above the 19 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.
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 Ashburn 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.”
Albany Park
35 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Ashburn's 35.
Open page →Grand Boulevard
35 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Ashburn's 35.
Open page →Brighton Park
34 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Ashburn's 35.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Ashburndoesn'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 |
|---|---|---|
| Sexual assault | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Ashburn's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 4 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 Ashburn, 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.