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 August, a light month by signal count. Robbery registered a single-month below-trend signal, the strongest signal this briefing, while vandalism has been running structurally above its historical pace across multiple months, a sustained shift rather than a one-month anomaly.
Robbery's 12-month total stands at 54, down 28.9% against the prior year's 76. Vandalism tells the opposite story: 541 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 394 in the year before, a 37.3% increase that reflects a multi-month structural rise, not a single noisy period. Every other tracked category, aggravated assault, other larceny, motor vehicle theft, sexual assault, and burglary, fell outside the signal range this month.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 54 incidents — about 46% 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 541, up 37% from 394 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 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 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.”
Edgewater
52 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Grand Boulevard's 54.
Open page →Gage Park
56 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Grand Boulevard's 54.
Open page →Washington Heights
52 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Grand Boulevard's 54.
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.