Garfield Ridge Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Garfield Ridge is a Southwest Side neighborhood on the western edge of Midway Airport, organized around Archer Avenue. Predominantly single-family ranch homes, with the Stevenson Expressway as the northern border and the Sanitary and Ship Canal to the south.
Three categories shifted structurally downward in Garfield Ridge this April — robbery, motor vehicle theft, and vandalism — all three registering as sustained multi-month moves, not single-month dips. No spikes, no rare events. The month's shape is a broad, structural decline across both violent and property categories.
Motor vehicle theft leads the sustained shifts at -42.3% against the prior 12 months, 142 incidents vs. 246 the year before. Robbery fell -53.3% over the same window — 21 incidents vs. 45 — and vandalism is down -28.8%, from 375 to 267. Everything else tracked within range: burglary is flat, other larceny moved less than 4%, and aggravated assault, while down -28.1%, did not cross the sustained-shift threshold this period.
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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 142, down 42% from 246 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 267, down 29% from 375 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 21, down 53% from 45 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 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 Garfield Ridge compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Irving Park
142 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Garfield Ridge's 142.
Open page →Albany Park
140 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Garfield Ridge's 142.
Open page →Edgewater
139 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Garfield Ridge's 142.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Garfield Ridge has spiked vandalism historically (7 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 0% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Vandalism | 7 | 0% |
| Aggravated assault | 1 | — too few |
| Motor vehicle theft | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Garfield Ridge's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 5 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 Garfield Ridge, 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.