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.
March 2026 in Uptown is a two-signal month with a clear structural shape: both tracked signals are sustained shifts, both pointing down. Aggravated assault and burglary have each moved lower across a multi-year comparison — not a single quiet month, but a pattern that held across the trailing 12 months against the 12 before.
Aggravated assault is down 29.7% on that 12-month basis, 161 incidents against 229 in the prior period. Burglary fell further in relative terms — down 34.9%, from 172 to 112. Every other tracked category, including robbery, motor vehicle theft, and other larceny, came in within normal range; vandalism is the one counter-move, up 12.4% year-over-year to 409 incidents, but it did not cross the anomaly threshold this month.
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.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 112, down 35% from 172 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 161, down 30% from 229 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 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 Uptown compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month aggravated assault 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 aggravated assault levels.”
Lake View
163 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Uptown's 161.
Open page →Rogers Park
154 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 below Uptown's 161.
Open page →West Ridge
145 incidents over the past 12 months — 16 below Uptown's 161.
Open page →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 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.