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 April — one a single-month below-trend signal, one a multi-month structural shift. The broader picture is a meaningful pullback in violent crime: both signals point in the same direction, and the 12-month totals reinforce that this is not just a quiet month.
Robbery ran below trend for the month, with 59 incidents over the trailing 12 months against a prior-year total of 85 — down 30.6%. Aggravated assault carries the structural story: 143 incidents over the current 12 months versus 218 the year before, a 34.4% reduction that the sustained-shift signal identifies as a longer-term move, not a one-month dip. Vandalism and motor vehicle theft both rose on a 12-month basis — 12.8% and 6.8% respectively — but neither crossed the anomaly threshold this period.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 59 incidents — about 42% below the 102 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.
- Aggravated Assault has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 143, down 34% from 218 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 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.”
Armour Square
57 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Grand Boulevard's 59.
Open page →Edgewater
56 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Grand Boulevard's 59.
Open page →Lincoln Park
56 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Grand Boulevard's 59.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Grand Boulevarddoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 3 | — too few |
Each row shows Grand Boulevard's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 7 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 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.