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 September, one spike, one single-month drop, and one sustained structural shift, pulling in different directions across the crime mix. The clearest story is not a uniform trend but a split: violent categories are moving against each other while property crime is drifting upward over the longer term.
Sexual assault is the strongest signal this month, with 42 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 31 in the prior year, a 35.5% increase. Robbery ran below trend for the month and is down 24.2% year-over-year, 50 incidents versus 66. Vandalism is the sustained-shift story: 416 incidents over the past 12 months against 331 the year before, a 25.7% increase that reflects a multi-month structural move rather than a single noisy period.
Notable signals 2
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 42 incidents — about 83% above the 23 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 50 incidents — about 37% below the 80 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.
- Vandalism is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 416, up 26% from 331 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 September 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.”
Chatham
42 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Douglas's 42.
Open page →South Chicago
43 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Douglas's 42.
Open page →Irving Park
40 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Douglas's 42.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Douglasdoesn'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 |
|---|---|---|
| Sexual assault | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Douglas's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 4 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 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 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.