Lincoln Park Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Lincoln Park is a North Side neighborhood organized around Lincoln Park itself — Chicago's largest park — and the DePaul University campus. Anchored by the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Chicago History Museum, and the Halsted-Armitage commercial corridor; bordered by Lake Michigan to the east.
Three categories moved in Lincoln Park this September, one below-trend signal and two structural shifts that have been building across the trailing 12 months. The mix is not dramatic in volume, but the directional story is split: property crime is pulling in opposite directions, with burglary down sharply and motor vehicle theft up sharply over the same period.
Robbery is the sharpest single-month signal, running below its multi-year pace with 62 incidents over the current 12 months against 74 in the prior year, a 16.2% drop. Burglary has shifted more dramatically, down 33.3% year-over-year, 132 incidents against 198, a move sustained long enough to read as structural rather than monthly noise. Motor vehicle theft runs the other direction, up 31.5% over the same window, 288 incidents against 219, and that sustained increase offsets much of the property-crime improvement elsewhere. Everything else, aggravated assault, vandalism, and other larceny, stayed within a narrow range.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 62 incidents — about 48% below the 119 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 132, down 33% from 198 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 288, up 32% from 219 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 September 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 Lincoln 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.”
West Pullman
61 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Lincoln Park's 62.
Open page →Lower West Side
60 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Lincoln Park's 62.
Open page →Rogers Park
64 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Lincoln Park's 62.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Lincoln 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.