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.
Three signals surfaced in South Shore this September, two one-month below-trend readings and one structural shift. Both point in the same direction: violent crime is running lower than recent history, with robbery accounting for two of the three signals, once as a single-month drop and once as a multi-month sustained shift.
Robbery is the clearest story. The trailing 12-month count stands at 186, down 26.2% from 252 in the prior year. Homicide also registered a one-month below-trend reading, consistent with the 12-month total of 12 against 28 the year before, a drop of 57.1%. Everything else in the category mix, aggravated assault, burglary, vandalism, motor vehicle theft, ran without a notable signal this month.
Notable signals 2
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 186 incidents — about 38% below the 298 average from prior years.
Homicide
The past 12 months saw 12 incidents — about 64% below the 33 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.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 186, down 26% from 252 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 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 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
183 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below South Shore's 186.
Open page →Near West Side
195 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 above South Shore's 186.
Open page →Humboldt Park
167 incidents over the past 12 months — 19 below South Shore's 186.
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 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.