North Center Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
North Center is a North Side neighborhood organized around Lincoln, Damen, and Irving Park Roads. Anchored by the historic St. Benedict parish, the North Center commercial strip, and the CTA Brown Line's Irving Park and Addison stations.
North Center registered two signals in September 2026, both sustained shifts, meaning structural multi-month moves rather than single-month noise. Burglary and motor vehicle theft are the two categories that broke from trend, in opposite directions, and between them they define the shape of the month: one category deep in a prolonged decline, the other in a prolonged rise.
Burglary is down 43.1% over the trailing 12 months, 41 incidents against 72 in the year before, the strongest sustained move in the neighborhood this period. Motor vehicle theft runs in the other direction, 114 incidents against 77 in the prior year, a 48.1% increase over the same window. Every other tracked category, including robbery, aggravated assault, vandalism, and other larceny, came in within a range that did not cross the anomaly threshold 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 41, down 43% from 72 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 114, up 48% from 77 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
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 North Center 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.”
Kenwood
41 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below North Center's 41.
Open page →Morgan Park
43 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above North Center's 41.
Open page →Near South Side
43 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above North Center's 41.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for North Center, 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.