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.
Lincoln Square's March 2026 briefing is a one-signal month. A single sustained shift surfaced — motor vehicle theft — with everything else tracking within normal range. That's a structurally quiet result, and the lone signal points in the same direction as the broader property-crime trend.
Motor vehicle theft is down 34.9% over the trailing 12 months against the prior year, 99 incidents versus 152 — a multi-month structural move, not a one-month dip. Robbery and burglary are also down meaningfully in the 12-month window, 34.1% and 28.3% respectively, though neither crossed the threshold for a separate signal this period. Other larceny is the one category running above prior-year levels, up 15.6% to 757 incidents, but it produced no signal this month.
Notable signals 0
Nothing notable surfaced this month — every category sits within normal range against its baseline.
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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 99, down 35% from 152 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 March 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 motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Clearing
99 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Lincoln Square's 99.
Open page →Avalon Park
103 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Lincoln Square's 99.
Open page →North Center
93 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 below Lincoln Square's 99.
Open page →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 SFPD's open dataset, mapped to 10 NIBRS-aligned categories, and aggregated to neighborhood × 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.