Loop Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
The Loop is Chicago's central business district, named for the elevated train tracks that loop around it. Anchored by Millennium Park, the Art Institute of Chicago, the main branch of the Chicago River, and the city's tallest skyscrapers including the Willis Tower and the Aon Center.
August 2026 produced no tracked signals in the Loop. Every category came in within its normal range for the month, and no single-month moves crossed any threshold in either direction. The month is as close to a statistical non-event as the data produces.
The 12-month trend underneath is a mixed picture. Burglary is down 28.7% against the prior year, 77 incidents vs. 108, and robbery is down 20.3%, 196 vs. 246. Motor vehicle theft is moving the other way, up 11.7% over the same period, 428 incidents vs. 383. Aggravated assault and sexual assault are both modestly above their prior-year totals, while other larceny and vandalism are each running a few percent below. No category produced a signal this month, but the 12-month divergence between property crime buckets is worth tracking into fall.
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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through August 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 Loop compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
Near West Side
3,439 incidents over the past 12 months — 140 above Loop's 3,299.
Open page →West Town
2,752 incidents over the past 12 months — 547 below Loop's 3,299.
Open page →Lake View
2,512 incidents over the past 12 months — 787 below Loop's 3,299.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Loop, 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.