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.
Avondale's March 2026 briefing comes down to a single signal: one category moved, and it moved down. Robbery is the lone tracked signal this month — everything else in the neighborhood held within normal range.
Robbery's trailing 12-month total is 38 incidents, against 61 in the prior 12 months — a 37.7% reduction year-over-year. That's also well below the longer-term baseline. The rest of the tracked categories are broadly flat to moderately down: motor vehicle theft is off 21.7% over 12 months (126 vs. 161), burglary down 14.9% (57 vs. 67), and other larceny is the only category above its prior-year level at +3.9% (886 vs. 853). No spikes, no rare events, no sustained structural shifts registered this month.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 38 incidents — about 56% below the 87 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 March 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.”
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 SFPD's open dataset, mapped to 10 NIBRS-aligned categories, and aggregated to neighborhood × 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.