Near North Side Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Near North Side is a downtown neighborhood that includes the Magnificent Mile, the Gold Coast, River North, and Streeterville. Anchored by the Tribune Tower, the Wrigley Building, Navy Pier, and the John Hancock Center; bordered by Lake Michigan to the east and the Chicago River to the south.
April 2026 was a quiet month for Near North Side. No tracked category crossed an anomaly threshold — zero signals across the full mix of property and violent crime buckets.
The 12-month trends running beneath that quiet surface are broadly downward across property and violent crime. Burglary is down 18.8% against the prior year (160 incidents vs. 197). Robbery is down 9.3% (264 vs. 291) and Aggravated Assault down 9.1% (298 vs. 328). Other Larceny is the outlier in the other direction — 4,835 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 4,485 the year before, a 7.8% rise — but it produced no single-month signal this period.
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 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 Near North Side 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.”
Loop
3,421 incidents over the past 12 months — 1414 below Near North Side's 4,835.
Open page →Near West Side
3,398 incidents over the past 12 months — 1437 below Near North Side's 4,835.
Open page →West Town
2,619 incidents over the past 12 months — 2216 below Near North Side's 4,835.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Near North Side, 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.