Austin Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Austin is a Far West Side neighborhood, the largest community area in Chicago by population, bordered by Oak Park to the west and the Eisenhower Expressway to the south. Anchored by the Austin Town Hall, the Madison Street and Chicago Avenue commercial corridors, and a long stretch of CTA Green Line stations.
Three signals emerged in Austin this April — two one-month below-trend readings and one sustained structural shift. The shape of the month is broadly downward, with vandalism and robbery both running below their usual rates, and robbery also showing a longer-term structural decline beneath the single-month move.
Vandalism's trailing 12-month total stands at 1,220, down from a baseline of 1,427.57 and off 7.1% against the prior year. Robbery is the more consequential mover: the sustained-shift signal reflects a structural decline, with the trailing 12-month count at 335 against 538 in the year before — a 37.7% reduction. Everything else in Austin this month was within normal range.
Notable signals 2
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 1,220 incidents — about 15% below the 1428 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 335 incidents — about 45% below the 612 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.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 335, down 38% from 538 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 April 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
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 Austin compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month vandalism 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 vandalism levels.”
Near West Side
1,215 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Austin's 1,220.
Open page →South Shore
1,072 incidents over the past 12 months — 148 below Austin's 1,220.
Open page →Auburn Gresham
874 incidents over the past 12 months — 346 below Austin's 1,220.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Austin, 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.