Rogers Park Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Rogers Park is a Far North Side neighborhood between the Evanston border and Devon Avenue, organized around the CTA Red Line's Loyola, Morse, and Howard stations. Anchored by Loyola University Chicago, the Glenwood Avenue Arts District, and a stretch of lakefront beaches.
Four categories moved in Rogers Park this August, two one-month below-trend signals and two sustained multi-month structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward: every category with a signal this month is running below its prior-year pace, and nothing registered an upward spike.
Robbery and vandalism both ran below trend for the month. Robbery's 12-month total is 66, down from 90 the prior year, a 26.7% decline. Motor vehicle theft is the clearest structural story: 177 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 254 the year before, a 30.3% drop that reflects a multi-month shift, not a single quiet stretch. Aggravated assault, at 151 incidents against 191 prior, adds further weight to the same directional pattern. Sexual assault, at 72 incidents against 61 the prior year, is the one category running in the opposite direction, up 18.0%, and stands apart from an otherwise consistent downward picture across Rogers Park.
Notable signals 2
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 66 incidents — about 46% below the 122 average from prior years.
Vandalism
The past 12 months saw 277 incidents — about 39% below the 451 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.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 277, down 26% from 373 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 177, down 30% from 254 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
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 Rogers Park compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month robbery 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 robbery levels.”
Uptown
69 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Rogers Park's 66.
Open page →West Pullman
63 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below Rogers Park's 66.
Open page →Lower West Side
61 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Rogers Park's 66.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Rogers 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.