Douglas Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Douglas is a Near South Side community area named for Senator Stephen A. Douglas (whose tomb is here), organized around the Illinois Institute of Technology campus and the 35th Street corridor. Anchored by the Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores apartment complexes, the historic Stephen A. Douglas Tomb State Memorial, and the Green Line's 35th-Bronzeville-IIT station.
Three categories moved in Douglas this March — one fresh spike and two sustained structural shifts running in the same direction. The shape of the month is mixed: violent crime categories like homicide, robbery, and aggravated assault are all down on a 12-month basis, but property crime and sexual assault are moving the other way.
Sexual assault registered the sharpest single-month signal, with 37 incidents over the current 12 months against a prior-year total of 27 — up 37.0% year over year. Motor vehicle theft and vandalism are both sustained shifts trending upward: motor vehicle theft is 49.8% above the prior 12 months (400 vs. 267), and vandalism is 33.9% higher (415 vs. 310). The violent crime picture is genuinely different — homicide is down 63.6% over the same window, from 11 to 4 — but the property and assault trends are what define Douglas's March.
Notable signals 1
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 37 incidents — about 65% above the 22 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 400, up 50% from 267 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Vandalism is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 415, up 34% from 310 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 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
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 Douglas compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month sexual 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 sexual assault levels.”
Portage Park
36 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Douglas's 37.
Open page →South Chicago
38 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Douglas's 37.
Open page →Washington Heights
38 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Douglas's 37.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Douglas, 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.