Chicago Lawn Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Chicago Lawn — also known as Marquette Park — is a Southwest Side neighborhood organized around 63rd Street and California Avenue. Anchored by Marquette Park itself, one of the largest parks on the South Side, with predominantly bungalow housing on a tight grid.
Three categories moved in Chicago Lawn this April — two one-month below-trend signals and one sustained structural shift. The overall shape is downward, concentrated in robbery and vandalism, with robbery carrying both a single-month drop and a longer-term structural signal.
Robbery is the most pronounced move: the trailing 12-month total sits at 103 incidents against a prior-year figure of 179, a 42.5% reduction. Vandalism also ran below trend this month, with 537 incidents over the current 12 months versus 575 in the year prior. Everything else — motor vehicle theft, aggravated assault, burglary — was within range and registered no signals.
Notable signals 2
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 103 incidents — about 50% below the 204 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 537 incidents — about 15% below the 633 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 103, down 43% from 179 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 Chicago Lawn 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.”
South Chicago
104 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Chicago Lawn's 103.
Open page →South Lawndale
107 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Chicago Lawn's 103.
Open page →West Englewood
107 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Chicago Lawn's 103.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Chicago Lawndoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Aggravated assault | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Chicago Lawn's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 5 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 Chicago Lawn, 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.