Hyde Park Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Hyde Park is a South Side lakefront neighborhood organized around the University of Chicago campus and 53rd Street. Anchored by the Museum of Science and Industry, Promontory Point, the historic Robie House, and the Metra Electric line; bordered by Washington Park to the west and Lake Michigan to the east.
Three signals surfaced in Hyde Park this August, one single-month below-trend reading and two sustained structural shifts. The overall shape is mixed: robbery is running well below its historical pace on both a monthly and multi-year basis, while vandalism has moved structurally in the other direction, a combination that makes this a more complicated picture than a simple "crime is down" reading.
Robbery is the clearest story: 30 incidents over the current 12 months against 57 in the prior year, a 47.4% reduction, with both a single-month below-trend signal and a sustained shift pointing the same direction. Vandalism pulls the opposite way, up 54.0% year over year, 362 incidents against 235, a structural increase that has built over multiple months rather than a single noisy reading. Everything else in the tracked categories, aggravated assault, sexual assault, burglary, other larceny, and motor vehicle theft, fell within range and did not register a signal this period.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 30 incidents — about 71% below the 104 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 362, up 54% from 235 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 30, down 47% from 57 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 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 Hyde Park 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.”
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Hyde 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.