Avondale Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Avondale is a Northwest Side neighborhood organized around Belmont Avenue and the CTA Blue Line's Belmont and Logan Square stations. Mixed industrial-and-residential along the North Branch of the Chicago River, with the historic Pulaski Park and the Belmont commercial strip as anchors.
Two signals moved in Avondale this April, and both point the same direction: robbery is down, structurally and in the current month. A one-month below-trend signal and a sustained multi-month shift landed on the same category — a relatively rare alignment that suggests the decline isn't just noise.
Robbery's trailing 12-month total stands at 35 incidents, down 44.4% against the prior 12 months (63). The multi-year baseline average sits at 86.23, making the current 12-month count less than half the historical norm. Every other tracked category — aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, vandalism — came in within range, with only other larceny moving against the grain at 9.2% above the prior year.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 35 incidents — about 59% below the 86 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 35, down 44% from 63 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
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 Avondale 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.”
Portage Park
35 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Avondale's 35.
Open page →Avalon Park
34 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Avondale's 35.
Open page →Fuller Park
36 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Avondale's 35.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Avondale has spiked other larceny historically (5 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 0% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 5 | 0% |
Each row shows Avondale'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 Avondale, 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.