Uptown Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Uptown is a North Side lakefront neighborhood organized around Broadway and Lawrence Avenue, anchored by the historic Aragon Ballroom, the Riviera Theatre, the Green Mill jazz club, and the CTA Red Line's Wilson and Lawrence stations. Mixed prewar apartment buildings and lakefront high-rises along Marine Drive.
Three categories moved in Uptown this September, a narrow month with a clear structural lean. One registered a single-month drop and two show sustained multi-month shifts, both downward. The overall shape is a neighborhood where violent and property crime has been contracting not just this month but across the trailing year.
Robbery ran below trend in the current period, with 67 incidents over the past 12 months against 96 the year before, a 30.2% gap. Aggravated assault and burglary are both in sustained decline: aggravated assault sits at 144 vs. 197 prior-year (down 26.9%), while burglary has dropped from 143 to 94 (down 34.3%). Everything else tracked within normal range, with no spikes and no rare-event signals this month.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 67 incidents — about 36% below the 104 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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 94, down 34% from 143 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Aggravated Assault has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 144, down 27% from 197 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 Uptown 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.”
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Uptown, 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.