Near South Side Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Near South Side is a downtown neighborhood including the Prairie Avenue Historic District, McCormick Place, and the South Loop. Anchored by Soldier Field, the Field Museum and the broader Museum Campus peninsula, and the Metra Electric line.
September 2026 was a quiet month for Near South Side. No tracked category crossed an anomaly threshold, and the signal count for the period is zero across all types, spikes, drops, sustained shifts, and rare events alike. The story this month is not in any single-month movement but in the sustained directional change visible across the trailing 12 months.
Every category in the 12-month window is running below the prior year. Sexual assault is down 47.5% against the prior 12 months, 21 incidents vs. 40. Burglary fell 25.9%, from 58 to 43, and motor vehicle theft is down 22.4%, from 237 to 184. Other larceny, the highest-volume category at 574 incidents over the trailing year, is also below its prior-year total of 637. Homicide recorded zero incidents in the current 12-month window against 7 in the year before. Nothing spiked, nothing broke pattern, and the broad downward trend across property and violent categories held through the 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.
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 Near South 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.”
Kenwood
561 incidents over the past 12 months — 13 below Near South Side's 574.
Open page →East Garfield Park
597 incidents over the past 12 months — 23 above Near South Side's 574.
Open page →Englewood
619 incidents over the past 12 months — 45 above Near South Side's 574.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Near South 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.