Lincoln Square Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Lincoln Square is a North Side neighborhood organized around Lawrence Avenue and Western Avenue, anchored by the historic Lincoln Square pedestrian plaza and the Old Town School of Folk Music. Predominantly two- and three-flat housing, with the CTA Brown Line's Western station as transit anchor.
September 2026 produced one notable signal in Lincoln Square: a spike in sexual assault. Every other tracked category was within range, making this a month with a single standout against an otherwise stable backdrop.
Sexual assault totaled 54 incidents over the trailing 12 months, up from 32 in the prior year, a 68.8% increase. The rest of the picture runs the other direction: burglary is down 33.7% year-over-year (57 incidents vs. 86), motor vehicle theft is down 23.0% (87 vs. 113), and vandalism is down 22.6% (164 vs. 212). Robbery fell 21.4%, from 28 to 22 incidents. The structural trend across property crime and most violent categories is broadly downward; the sexual assault move is the single exception requiring attention this month.
Notable signals 1
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 54 incidents — about 76% above the 31 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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
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 Square compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month sexual assault 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 sexual assault levels.”
East Garfield Park
54 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Lincoln Square's 54.
Open page →Edgewater
54 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Lincoln Square's 54.
Open page →Lower West Side
54 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Lincoln Square's 54.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Lincoln Squaredoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 1 | — too few |
| Sexual assault | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Lincoln Square's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 8 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 Lincoln Square, 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.