Belmont Cragin Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Belmont Cragin is a Northwest Side neighborhood between the Metra Milwaukee District-North Line and the Elmwood Park border, organized around the Belmont and Cragin commercial corridors. Predominantly bungalows and two-flats on a tight grid, named for the Cragin Brothers' tin-plate factory that once dominated the area.
September 2026 produced a single structural signal in Belmont Cragin: motor vehicle theft has shifted upward across the trailing 12 months, not a one-month spike but a sustained change in the category's baseline level. Every other tracked category was within its normal range, making this a narrowly focused briefing rather than a broad-based move.
Motor vehicle theft is up 40.2% against the prior 12 months, 338 incidents vs. 241 in the year before. That gap is the defining data point for the neighborhood this period. Robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and sexual assault all ran modestly below their prior-year totals, down between 2.3% and 9.1%, and none crossed the threshold for a notable signal. The concern for Belmont Cragin is concentrated in one category, and the 12-month trend there is moving in the wrong direction.
Notable signals 0
Nothing notable surfaced this month — every category sits within normal range against its baseline.
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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 338, up 40% from 241 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
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
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 Belmont Cragin compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Chicago Lawn
331 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 below Belmont Cragin's 338.
Open page →South Chicago
345 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 above Belmont Cragin's 338.
Open page →Englewood
347 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 above Belmont Cragin's 338.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Belmont Cragin, 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.