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 August, and the shape is broadly downward. Three registered one-month below-trend signals: robbery, aggravated assault, and vandalism. A fourth category carried a sustained multi-month shift, pointing to a structural change rather than a single quiet month.
Robbery is the strongest signal, with the trailing 12-month total at 159 incidents against 224 in the prior year, a 29.0% reduction. Aggravated assault follows, down 17.0% year-over-year to 438 incidents from 528. Vandalism also ran below trend this month. Motor vehicle theft moved in the opposite direction, up 14.7% to 391 incidents from 341, and other larceny edged up 5.0%, the two categories bucking an otherwise downward read on the neighborhood this period.
Notable signals 3
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 159 incidents — about 50% below the 321 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 438 incidents — about 24% below the 577 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 626 incidents — about 21% below the 789 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 159, down 29% from 224 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 August 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.”
Greater Grand Crossing
167 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 above North Lawndale's 159.
Open page →Chatham
147 incidents over the past 12 months — 12 below North Lawndale's 159.
Open page →Roseland
144 incidents over the past 12 months — 15 below North Lawndale's 159.
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.