Riverdale Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Riverdale is a Far South Side neighborhood between the Calumet River and the Bishop Ford Expressway, including the Altgeld Gardens public housing development. Predominantly low-rise housing, bordered by the Beaubien Woods forest preserve.
August 2026 produced a single structural signal in Riverdale: a sustained, multi-month downward shift in motor vehicle theft. No spikes, no rare events, and no other category crossed the anomaly threshold. The shape of the month is narrow but meaningful, one category moving in a direction that has held across more than a single billing period.
Motor vehicle theft is down 42.7% over the trailing 12 months, 59 incidents against 103 in the year prior. That is the dominant story. Robbery also declined sharply over the same window, 20 incidents against 34, a 41.2% drop, though that did not register as a sustained-shift signal this month. Aggravated assault ran the other way, 109 incidents against 90 in the prior 12 months, a 21.1% rise worth tracking, even though it sits outside the formal signal threshold for August.
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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 59, down 43% from 103 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
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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 Riverdale compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Norwood Park
58 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Riverdale's 59.
Open page →Ohare
57 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Riverdale's 59.
Open page →Fuller Park
64 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above Riverdale's 59.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Riverdale, 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.