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.
North Lawndale had four tracked signals in March 2026 — three one-month below-trend drops and one sustained structural shift. The overall shape is broadly downward, with no spikes or rare events in the mix.
Robbery is the sharpest mover: the trailing 12-month total stands at 163 incidents, down 40.5% against the prior year's 274. Vandalism and Arson also ran below trend this month. Outside those three, categories including Aggravated Assault and Motor Vehicle Theft are also lower year-over-year — Aggravated Assault at 487 vs. 571, Motor Vehicle Theft at 338 vs. 376 — suggesting the downward movement this month sits within a broader multi-category pattern rather than an isolated one-month dip.
Notable signals 3
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 163 incidents — about 50% below the 326 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 627 incidents — about 21% below the 799 average from prior years.
Arson
The past 12 months saw 11 incidents — about 45% below the 20 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 163, down 41% from 274 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 March 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.”
Englewood
160 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below North Lawndale's 163.
Open page →Roseland
159 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below North Lawndale's 163.
Open page →Humboldt Park
155 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 below North Lawndale's 163.
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 SFPD's open dataset, mapped to 10 NIBRS-aligned categories, and aggregated to neighborhood × 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.