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.
August 2026 brought a single notable signal in Norwood Park: one category moved against trend, and the rest of the tracked categories were within their normal ranges. The month is narrow in scope, not broad, with just one below-trend move registered across all tracked crime types.
Burglary is the mover. The trailing 12-month total stands at 28 incidents, down from 36 the year before, a 22.2% drop year-over-year. The longer-term picture reinforces this: aggravated assault is down 54.8% over the same window (19 incidents vs. 42), and robbery has fallen to 7 from 15, a 53.3% decline. Motor vehicle theft is the counterweight, up 18.4% to 58 incidents, and sexual assault has risen to 15 from 9, a 66.7% increase over 12 months, though neither crossed the anomaly threshold this month.
Notable signals 1
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 28 incidents — about 50% below the 56 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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
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 Norwood Park 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.”
Hermosa
30 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Norwood Park's 28.
Open page →South Deering
30 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Norwood Park's 28.
Open page →Armour Square
31 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Norwood Park's 28.
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.