Portage Park Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Portage Park is a Northwest Side neighborhood organized around Portage Park itself and the Six Corners commercial intersection at Irving Park, Cicero, and Milwaukee. Predominantly bungalows and brick two-flats, with the historic Portage Theater as a longtime landmark.
Two categories moved in Portage Park in August 2026, both below trend. The shape of the month is narrow but consistent: no spikes, no rare events, just a pair of drops against a backdrop of broader multi-year declines across the neighborhood's crime categories.
Burglary is the stronger of the two signals, with 61 incidents over the current 12 months against 88 in the prior year, down 30.7%. Aggravated assault also ran below trend this month, part of a 12-month total of 93 against 120 the year before, a 22.5% reduction. Every other tracked category, including motor vehicle theft and other larceny, came in within its normal range.
Notable signals 2
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 61 incidents — about 52% below the 128 average from prior years.
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 93 incidents — about 22% below the 119 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 Portage 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.”
West Garfield Park
61 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below Portage Park's 61.
Open page →Irving Park
62 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Portage Park's 61.
Open page →Rogers Park
62 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Portage Park's 61.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Portage 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.