North Lawndale Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
North Lawndale is a West Side neighborhood organized around Roosevelt Road and Ogden Avenue, anchored by Douglass Park and the historic Sears Roebuck headquarters tower. Predominantly two- and three-flat housing, with the Eisenhower Expressway as the southern border.
Four categories moved in North Lawndale this June — three ran below trend in a single month, and one registered as a structural sustained shift. The overall shape is downward across violent crime, with robbery, vandalism, and aggravated assault all below-trend signals and no spikes or rare events anywhere in the mix.
Robbery is the most prominent mover: the current 12-month total is 156 against a baseline of 323, and down 35.3% against the prior 12 months (156 vs. 241). Aggravated assault follows at 449 incidents over the trailing year, down 18.7% from 552. Vandalism also ran below trend this month, though its 12-month total of 636 is nearly flat year-over-year at -1.7%, making it the quieter of the three drops.
Notable signals 3
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 156 incidents — about 52% below the 323 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 636 incidents — about 20% below the 794 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 449 incidents — about 22% below the 578 average from prior years.
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 156, down 35% from 241 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 June 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 Lawndale compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month robbery 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 robbery levels.”
Roseland
155 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below North Lawndale's 156.
Open page →Humboldt Park
162 incidents over the past 12 months — 6 above North Lawndale's 156.
Open page →Chatham
148 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 below North Lawndale's 156.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for North Lawndale, 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.