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.
August 2026 brought two signals in Ashburn, a narrow month but not a routine one. The leading signal is a one-month spike in sexual assault, and burglary has registered as a sustained structural shift downward, a multi-month move rather than a single quiet period. Everything else tracked within normal range.
Burglary is down 43.3% over the trailing 12 months, 38 incidents against 67 in the prior year, and the sustained-shift classification means that gap reflects a durable change in pattern, not a one-month aberration. Sexual assault reached 33 incidents over the current 12-month window, up from 31 in the prior year, with the spike driven by the single-month figure. Aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft both continued running below their prior-year levels, down 24.1% and 16.1% respectively, but neither crossed a signal threshold this month.
Notable signals 1
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 33 incidents — about 75% 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 38, down 43% from 67 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 August 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.”
Grand Boulevard
33 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Ashburn's 33.
Open page →Woodlawn
33 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Ashburn's 33.
Open page →Albany Park
34 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Ashburn's 33.
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 | 1 | — 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.