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.
Two categories moved in Garfield Ridge this September, one a single-month below-trend signal and one a multi-year structural shift. The combination is narrow but meaningful: the downward moves in robbery and vandalism point in the same direction, and neither looks like noise.
Robbery is the stronger signal, with the trailing 12-month count at 15 against 39 in the prior year, down 61.5%. Vandalism's move is structural rather than a one-month dip: a sustained shift downward, with 246 incidents over the current 12 months compared to 345 in the prior period, a drop of 28.7%. Every other tracked category in Garfield Ridge stayed within its expected range this month.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 15 incidents — about 62% below the 39 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 has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 246, down 29% from 345 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 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 Garfield Ridge 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.”
Beverly
15 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Garfield Ridge's 15.
Open page →Dunning
14 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Garfield Ridge's 15.
Open page →McKinley Park
16 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Garfield Ridge's 15.
Open page →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.