South Chicago Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
South Chicago is a Far Southeast Side neighborhood at the mouth of the Calumet River, anchored by the historic U.S. Steel South Works site (now under redevelopment) and the Bush subdivision. Bordered by Lake Michigan to the east and the Calumet River industrial corridor.
September 2026 was a quiet month for South Chicago. No tracked category crossed an anomaly threshold, and the signal count was zero across all types, no spikes, no sustained shifts, no rare events. The dominant story is the multi-year directional trend visible in the 12-month totals.
Across nearly every category, the trailing 12 months are running below the prior year. Homicide is down 38.5% year over year, 8 incidents against 13. Vandalism fell 10.8%, 519 vs 582, and motor vehicle theft dropped 9.7%, 345 vs 382. The one exception is sexual assault, up 38.7% on a small base, 43 incidents in the current 12 months against 31 in the year before, a move worth watching even though it did not cross a single-month threshold this briefing.
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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through September 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 South Chicago compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
Albany Park
523 incidents over the past 12 months — 29 above South Chicago's 494.
Open page →West Pullman
465 incidents over the past 12 months — 29 below South Chicago's 494.
Open page →Bridgeport
461 incidents over the past 12 months — 33 below South Chicago's 494.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for South Chicago, 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.