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.
March 2026 was a narrow month for Riverdale — one tracked signal, a sustained structural shift in motor vehicle theft. This is not a one-month dip but a multi-month move: the trailing 12 months are running 38.5% below the prior 12, evidence of a longer realignment rather than noise. Every other tracked category stayed within range.
Motor vehicle theft is the clearest story: 67 incidents over the current 12 months against 109 in the year before. Aggravated assault and other larceny also show meaningful 12-month declines — down 23.7% and 25.0% respectively — though neither crossed the signal threshold this month. On the other side, burglary is up 57.1% over the same window (22 incidents vs. 14), a category to watch even if the absolute counts remain low.
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 67, down 39% from 109 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
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.”
Hermosa
68 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Riverdale's 67.
Open page →Beverly
69 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Riverdale's 67.
Open page →Montclare
69 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Riverdale's 67.
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 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.