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 August: two one-month below-trend signals and one sustained multi-month shift. The structural story is robbery, which has been running well below its prior-year pace long enough to register as a structural shift, not just a quiet month. The one-month signals, vandalism and robbery both dipping below trend, land on top of that longer pattern.
Vandalism is down 12.5% over the trailing 12 months, 492 incidents against 562 the year before. Robbery has fallen 47.7% year over year, 90 incidents against 172, a gap large enough to move from a single-month anomaly into sustained-shift territory. Everything else in the neighborhood, aggravated assault, burglary, other larceny, vandalism, was within its normal range this month, making the robbery decline the clearest structural signal in the August data.
Notable signals 2
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 492 incidents — about 22% below the 630 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 90 incidents — about 56% below the 203 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 90, down 48% from 172 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 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 Chicago Lawn compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month vandalism 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 vandalism levels.”
Englewood
500 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 above Chicago Lawn's 492.
Open page →Woodlawn
503 incidents over the past 12 months — 11 above Chicago Lawn's 492.
Open page →West Englewood
513 incidents over the past 12 months — 21 above Chicago Lawn's 492.
Open page →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.