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.
Three categories moved in Portage Park this March — one single-month below-trend signal and two sustained structural shifts. The dominant shape is downward across violent and property crime, with robbery and burglary both showing multi-month declines that go well beyond a quiet calendar period.
Burglary is the strongest signal: 67 incidents in the current 12 months against 105 in the prior year, a 36.2% reduction, and the drop signal this month adds a one-month exclamation point to that longer trend. Robbery has fallen 49.3% year-over-year — 34 incidents vs 67 — and registers as a sustained shift, meaning the lower volume has held across multiple months. Aggravated assault is also down 23.5% over the same window (101 vs 132), though it sits outside the top three signals this month. Other larceny is the one category moving in the opposite direction, up 4.2% year-over-year at 928 incidents.
Notable signals 1
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 67 incidents — about 49% below the 131 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 34, down 49% from 67 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 67, down 36% from 105 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 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.”
Hyde Park
66 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Portage Park's 67.
Open page →Lincoln Square
66 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Portage Park's 67.
Open page →North Center
66 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Portage Park's 67.
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 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.