Norwood Park Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Norwood Park is a Far Northwest Side residential neighborhood on the Park Ridge border, organized around Northwest Highway and the Metra Union Pacific-Northwest Line. Predominantly single-family homes, including the historic Norwood Park subdivision dating to the 1870s.
September 2026 was a quiet month in Norwood Park. No tracked category crossed an anomaly threshold, and the signal count for the month is zero. The story this briefing is entirely in the 12-month trends, which are broadly downward across violent crime and property crime alike.
Aggravated assault is down 39.5% against the prior 12 months, 23 incidents vs 38 in the year before. Robbery follows the same direction, 8 incidents vs 13, a 38.5% reduction. Vandalism is also well below its prior-year pace at 96 incidents vs 131, down 26.7%. The exception is sexual assault, where the current 12-month total of 17 is 88.9% above the prior year's 9, a count still small in absolute terms but a direction worth watching. Motor vehicle theft ticked up modestly, 61 vs 54, while burglary held essentially flat.
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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
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 Norwood Park compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
Calumet Heights
255 incidents over the past 12 months — 27 below Norwood Park's 282.
Open page →Pullman
255 incidents over the past 12 months — 27 below Norwood Park's 282.
Open page →North Park
248 incidents over the past 12 months — 34 below Norwood Park's 282.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Norwood Park, 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.