Grand Boulevard Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Grand Boulevard is a South Side neighborhood, the historical core of the Bronzeville district, organized around Martin Luther King Drive and 47th Street. Anchored by the Harold Washington Cultural Center, the historic Regal Theater site, and the Green Line's Indiana station.
Two categories moved in Grand Boulevard this September, a one-month below-trend signal in robbery and a sustained multi-month structural shift in vandalism. The mix is narrow but the two signals point in opposite directions, which makes this a more complex month than the low total count suggests.
Robbery is the sharper move: the trailing 12-month total stands at 57 incidents against 77 in the prior year, down 26.0%, and the single-month reading reinforces that longer decline. Vandalism is the counterweight: 544 incidents over the past 12 months against 373 the year before, up 45.8%, and the sustained-shift signal means this is not a one-month anomaly but a structural increase that has built across multiple months. Everything else, aggravated assault, burglary, other larceny, motor vehicle theft, ran within normal range.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 57 incidents — about 43% below the 100 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 544, up 46% from 373 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 Grand Boulevard 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.”
Gage Park
54 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Grand Boulevard's 57.
Open page →Lower West Side
60 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Grand Boulevard's 57.
Open page →West Pullman
61 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Grand Boulevard's 57.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Grand Boulevard, 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.