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 categories moved in Hyde Park this April — one single-month spike and two sustained structural shifts pulling in opposite directions. The dominant signal is vandalism, which produced both a spike and a multi-year structural shift upward. Robbery is the counterweight: a sustained shift downward that has reshaped the 12-month picture meaningfully.
Vandalism's 12-month total now stands at 367 incidents, up 63.8% against the prior year's 224 — and well above the multi-year baseline of 192.66. That gap is structural, not noise. Robbery has moved the other direction: 41 incidents over the current 12 months versus 70 in the prior period, a 41.4% decline. Every other tracked category — aggravated assault, sexual assault, burglary, other larceny, motor vehicle theft — registered no anomalies this month.
Notable signals 1
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 367 incidents — about 90% above the 193 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 367, up 64% from 224 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 41, down 41% from 70 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 Hyde Park 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.”
Lincoln Park
366 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Hyde Park's 367.
Open page →West Ridge
368 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Hyde Park's 367.
Open page →Washington Heights
369 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Hyde Park's 367.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Hyde Park has spiked other larceny historically (14 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 100% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 14 | 100% |
| Sexual assault | 6 | 66.7% |
| Vandalism | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Hyde Park's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 4 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 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.