Burnside Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Burnside is a small Far South Side community area between the Bishop Ford Expressway and the Norfolk Southern railroad corridor. Named for the Burnside subdivision developed by the Illinois Central Railroad; one of the smallest of Chicago's 77 community areas by both area and population.
March 2026 was a single-signal month in Burnside. One category moved — aggravated assault ran below its trend line — and every other tracked category stayed within normal range.
Aggravated assault is down 42.9% over the trailing 12 months, 16 incidents against 28 in the prior year. Other larceny is the one counter-move in the annual picture, up 70.6% year-over-year (58 incidents vs. 34), though it did not register a monthly signal this period. Robbery and sexual assault also show large 12-month declines — 46.7% and 50.0% respectively — but those are structural patterns in the annual counts, not fresh monthly moves.
Notable signals 1
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 16 incidents — about 38% below the 26 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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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 Burnside compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month aggravated assault 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 aggravated assault levels.”
Ohare
19 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Burnside's 16.
Open page →Mount Greenwood
12 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below Burnside's 16.
Open page →Forest Glen
9 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 below Burnside's 16.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Burnside, 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.