Washington Heights Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Washington Heights is a Far South Side residential neighborhood on the Blue Island Ridge, organized around 95th and 103rd Streets. Predominantly single-family bungalows, bordered by the Beverly neighborhood to the west and Roseland to the east.
August 2026 was a quiet month in Washington Heights. No tracked category crossed an anomaly threshold, and the signal count was zero across all crime types. The story this month is structural: a broad, multi-category decline that has been building over the trailing 12 months.
Robbery is the sharpest mover in the 12-month window, down 27.8% against the prior year, 52 incidents vs 72. Burglary and motor vehicle theft also ran lower, off 14.3% and 11.9% respectively, and other larceny fell 10.3% to 428 incidents from 477. Aggravated assault and vandalism held roughly flat, and sexual assault was nearly unchanged at 32 incidents vs 33. No category produced a single-month signal worth separating from the longer downward drift.
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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
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 Washington Heights compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
West Lawn
431 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Washington Heights's 428.
Open page →North Center
450 incidents over the past 12 months — 22 above Washington Heights's 428.
Open page →Ohare
452 incidents over the past 12 months — 24 above Washington Heights's 428.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Washington Heights, 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.