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.
August 2026 produced a single structural signal in Belmont Cragin: a sustained shift upward in motor vehicle theft. Every other tracked category was within its normal range, making this a focused, one-category story rather than a broad movement month.
Motor vehicle theft is up 32.9% over the prior 12 months, 335 incidents against 252 in the year before. That gap reflects a multi-month structural change, not a one-time spike. Robbery, burglary, and sexual assault all ran below their prior-year totals, down 8.6%, 12.4%, and 10.9% respectively, and aggravated assault held nearly flat at -1.4%. The motor vehicle theft trend is the outlier in an otherwise stable picture.
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 335, up 33% from 252 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 August 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.”
Logan Square
336 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Belmont Cragin's 335.
Open page →South Chicago
338 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Belmont Cragin's 335.
Open page →West Englewood
340 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Belmont Cragin's 335.
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.