Hegewisch Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Hegewisch is a Far Southeast Side neighborhood on the Indiana border, founded in 1883 as a planned company town for the U.S. Rolling Stock Company. Bordered by the Wolf Lake forest preserve and the Calumet River industrial corridor; predominantly single-family homes with a small commercial strip on Baltimore Avenue.
Three signals surfaced in Hegewisch this June — one single-month spike and two sustained structural shifts. The shape is split: property crime is moving in opposite directions at once, with vandalism rising sharply while other larceny has been falling for months.
Vandalism is the most acute signal. The trailing 12-month total is 151 incidents against 93 in the prior year, a 62.4% increase — and this month registered an additional spike on top of that already-elevated baseline. Other larceny is moving the other way: 118 incidents in the current 12 months versus 186 in the prior period, down 36.6%, a sustained structural shift rather than a one-month dip. Motor vehicle theft has also pulled back 21.7% year-over-year, to 83 incidents from 106. Everything else — robbery, aggravated assault, burglary — stayed close enough to prior-year levels to clear no thresholds.
Notable signals 1
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 151 incidents — about 84% above the 82 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.
- Other Larceny has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 118, down 37% from 186 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Vandalism is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 151, up 62% from 93 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 June 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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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 Hegewisch compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month vandalism 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 vandalism levels.”
Armour Square
149 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Hegewisch's 151.
Open page →Riverdale
149 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Hegewisch's 151.
Open page →Dunning
155 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Hegewisch's 151.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Hegewischdoesn'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 |
|---|---|---|
| Vandalism | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Hegewisch's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 3 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 Hegewisch, 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.