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 signals registered in East Garfield Park this August, both pointing the same direction: robbery ran below trend in a single-month drop, and the trailing 12-month window also shows a sustained structural shift downward. The month's shape is narrow but consistent, two signals, one category, one direction.
Robbery is the clearest story in the data. The trailing 12 months logged 89 incidents against 169 in the prior 12-month window, a 47.3% year-over-year reduction. That gap is large enough to register as both a sustained shift and a current-month drop, meaning the decline has been building across multiple months, not just a quiet August. Every other tracked category, aggravated assault, burglary, vandalism, homicide, was within its usual range this month, though other larceny (597 vs. 524, up 13.9%) and motor vehicle theft (294 vs. 264, up 11.4%) bear watching in future briefings.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 89 incidents — about 54% below the 194 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 89, down 47% from 169 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 East Garfield Park compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month robbery 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 robbery levels.”
Chicago Lawn
90 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above East Garfield Park's 89.
Open page →South Lawndale
90 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above East Garfield Park's 89.
Open page →Woodlawn
90 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above East Garfield Park's 89.
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 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.