Clearing Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Clearing is a Southwest Side neighborhood adjacent to Midway Airport, bordered by the BNSF Clearing Yard, one of the largest railroad classification yards in the country. Predominantly single-family ranch homes, with a strong industrial-and-rail-yard employment base.
April 2026 was a quiet month in Clearing. No tracked category crossed an anomaly threshold — zero signals across the full flag mix. The story this month is structural: a broad, multi-year compression in violent and property crime that continues without interruption.
Robbery is down 57.9% against the prior 12 months (8 incidents vs. 19), and burglary is down 31.7% (28 vs. 41). Aggravated assault and vandalism are both lower year-over-year as well — down 21.8% and 20.3% respectively. Sexual assault is the one category running above the prior period, 13 incidents against 8, though it did not cross a signal threshold this month. Everything else in April landed within its expected range.
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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
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 Clearing compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
Montclare
190 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Clearing's 188.
Open page →Hermosa
196 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 above Clearing's 188.
Open page →Jefferson Park
204 incidents over the past 12 months — 16 above Clearing's 188.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Clearing, 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.