South Shore Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
South Shore is a South Side lakefront neighborhood organized around 71st and 79th Streets, anchored by the South Shore Cultural Center (the former South Shore Country Club) and Rainbow Beach Park. Mixed mid-rise apartments and single-family homes, bordered by Lake Michigan to the east and the Metra Electric line to the west.
March 2026 produced a single tracked signal in South Shore: a below-trend move in robbery. One flag across all tracked categories is a quiet month by any measure, but the broader 12-month picture adds meaningful context — violent crime and property crime are both running well below their prior-year totals across almost every bucket.
Robbery is the one category that crossed the anomaly threshold, with 223 incidents over the current 12 months against 284 in the prior year, down 21.5%. That sits alongside a 36.1% drop in homicide (23 vs. 36), a 12.4% drop in aggravated assault (586 vs. 669), and a 17.4% drop in burglary (319 vs. 386). The two exceptions are motor vehicle theft, up 20.6% to 698, and vandalism, up 8.2% to 1,079 — neither crossed the signal threshold this month, but both are running above their prior-year baselines.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 223 incidents — about 26% below the 300 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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
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
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 Shore 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.”
Loop
222 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below South Shore's 223.
Open page →Near West Side
204 incidents over the past 12 months — 19 below South Shore's 223.
Open page →Greater Grand Crossing
199 incidents over the past 12 months — 24 below South Shore's 223.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for South Shore, 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.