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.
Two categories moved in Lincoln Park this April — one a single-month below-trend signal, one a structural multi-year shift. The overall shape is narrow but pointed: both signals are in the downward direction, and both sit in property or violent crime categories that have been declining across the trailing 12 months.
Robbery is the sharper signal, running well below its multi-year baseline — 56 incidents over the current 12 months against a baseline mean of 121.87, and down 32.5% against the prior year's 83. Burglary shows the same directional story but as a sustained structural shift: 159 incidents over the current 12 months vs. 236 in the prior period, a 32.6% reduction that has held long enough to register as a multi-year change rather than a single quiet month. Every other tracked category stayed within normal range.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 56 incidents — about 54% below the 122 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 159, down 33% from 236 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 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.”
Edgewater
56 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Lincoln Park's 56.
Open page →Armour Square
57 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Lincoln Park's 56.
Open page →Gage Park
55 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Lincoln Park's 56.
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.