Near West Side Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Near West Side is a West Side neighborhood including Greektown, Little Italy, the United Center, and the University of Illinois Chicago campus. Anchored by the Eisenhower Expressway, the historic Maxwell Street Market site, and the CTA Pink Line's Polk station.
Two sustained structural shifts define September 2026 in Near West Side, both pointing downward. Robbery and burglary are not one-month dips; both have crossed the threshold for multi-month, multi-year declines, making this a quiet briefing in the best sense: the pattern is holding, not just pausing.
Robbery is down 30.1% against the prior 12 months, 195 incidents vs. 279. Burglary fell 26.6%, 157 incidents vs. 214. Every other tracked category, including aggravated assault, vandalism, and motor vehicle theft, moved within a range that did not cross the anomaly threshold, with motor vehicle theft the one category running above its prior-year pace at 16.5%. The two sustained-shift signals here represent durable changes in the crime mix, not seasonal noise.
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.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 195, down 30% from 279 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 157, down 27% from 214 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 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 West Side compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month burglary 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 burglary levels.”
Near North Side
158 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Near West Side's 157.
Open page →Roseland
155 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Near West Side's 157.
Open page →West Pullman
154 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Near West Side's 157.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Near West 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.