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.
September 2026 produced a single notable signal in Austin: robbery running well below its multi-year pace. One category crossed the anomaly threshold this month, and the rest of the tracked categories were within their expected ranges.
Robbery's trailing 12-month total stands at 325 incidents, down 23.5% against the prior 12 months (425). That gap is the dominant story. Homicide and burglary also declined on a 12-month basis, 27.7% and 20.1% respectively, though neither produced a single-month signal this period. Motor vehicle theft is the one category moving the other direction, up 19.3% year-over-year, 947 incidents against 794, but it did not cross the threshold for a discrete signal this month.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 325 incidents — about 46% below the 603 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
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 robbery 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 robbery levels.”
Near North Side
239 incidents over the past 12 months — 86 below Austin's 325.
Open page →Near West Side
195 incidents over the past 12 months — 130 below Austin's 325.
Open page →South Shore
186 incidents over the past 12 months — 139 below Austin's 325.
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.