Humboldt Park Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Humboldt Park is a West Side neighborhood organized around Humboldt Park itself (designed by William Le Baron Jenney), bordered by Western Avenue and Pulaski Road. Anchored by the Paseo Boricua commercial corridor on Division Street, the boulevard system that connects to Logan Square, and the historic Pulaski Park field house.
Two categories moved in Humboldt Park this August, one a single-month below-trend signal and one a structural multi-month shift. The overall picture is mixed: violent crime categories are broadly down on a 12-month basis, while motor vehicle theft has been running well above prior-year levels for long enough to register as a sustained shift rather than a one-time move.
Arson is the month's most distinct signal, with only 7 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 12 in the year before, a 12-month count well below its recent historical range. Motor vehicle theft is pulling in the opposite direction: 550 incidents in the current 12 months against 422 in the prior year, a 30.3% rise that has now persisted long enough to reflect a structural change, not a noisy month. Everything else, including robbery down 24.3% and homicide down 60.0% on the 12-month comparison, fell within trend and generated no additional signals this period.
Notable signals 1
Arson
The past 12 months saw 7 incidents — about 66% below the 20 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 550, up 30% from 422 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 Humboldt Park compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month arson 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 arson levels.”
Washington Heights
7 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Humboldt Park's 7.
Open page →West Garfield Park
7 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Humboldt Park's 7.
Open page →East Garfield Park
8 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Humboldt Park's 7.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Humboldt Park, 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.