South Lawndale Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
South Lawndale — also known as Little Village — is a Southwest Side neighborhood organized around the 26th Street commercial corridor and the historic Little Village Arch. Predominantly two- and three-flat housing, bordered by the Stevenson Expressway and the Cook County Jail complex.
South Lawndale had a structurally quiet August 2026: just one tracked signal across all categories, a sustained multi-month shift in robbery. The broader picture is not uniformly calm, but the movement this month is concentrated in a single, meaningful directional trend rather than spread across several categories.
Robbery is the clearest story, down 41.6% over the trailing 12 months against the prior year, 90 incidents versus 154. That is a structural shift, not a one-month dip, meaning the lower rate has held across multiple months. Aggravated assault also fell over the same window, down 21.5% (245 vs. 312), and burglary dropped 16.3%. On the other side, homicide ticked up to 18 from 14 over the same 12-month span, and motor vehicle theft rose 11.7%, reaching 181 incidents against 162 the year before. Every other category landed within a few percentage points of prior-year levels.
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.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 90, down 42% from 154 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 South Lawndale 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.”
Chicago Lawn
90 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below South Lawndale's 90.
Open page →Woodlawn
90 incidents over the past 12 months — 0 below South Lawndale's 90.
Open page →East Garfield Park
89 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below South Lawndale's 90.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for South Lawndale, 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.