East Garfield Park Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
East Garfield Park is a West Side neighborhood organized around Garfield Park itself, bordered by the Eisenhower Expressway. Anchored by the historic Garfield Park Conservatory — one of the largest conservatories in the country — and the CTA Green Line along Lake Street.
Two categories moved in East Garfield Park this March — one one-month below-trend signal and one structural sustained shift. The overall picture is a narrow but meaningful downward move in two of the neighborhood's historically elevated categories: homicide and robbery.
Homicide is running at 12 incidents over the current 12 months, down 25.0% against the prior 12 months (16) and below the multi-year baseline. Robbery shows a deeper structural move — 106 incidents over the current 12 months against 198 in the prior year, a 12-month sustained shift down 46.5%. The remaining six tracked categories — aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, other larceny, sexual assault, and vandalism — all came in within normal range, with aggravated assault the one exception trending modestly upward at 294 vs. 273, a 7.7% rise year over year.
Notable signals 1
Homicide
The past 12 months saw 12 incidents — about 50% below the 24 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 106, down 47% from 198 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 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 East Garfield Park compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month homicide 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 homicide levels.”
Near North Side
11 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below East Garfield Park's 12.
Open page →South Lawndale
13 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above East Garfield Park's 12.
Open page →Humboldt Park
14 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above East Garfield Park's 12.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for East Garfield Park, 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.