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.
Washington Heights produced a single notable signal in September 2026: aggravated assault ran below trend for the month, the one category that moved outside its normal range. Every other tracked category came in within range, making this one of the quieter months in the neighborhood's recent history.
Aggravated assault sits at 127 incidents over the trailing 12 months, down from 129 in the prior year. The broader property and violent crime picture is more substantive: robbery is down 26.5% year over year, 50 incidents against 68, and burglary has fallen 20.7%, 65 against 82. Motor vehicle theft and other larceny are also lower than the prior year. Vandalism and aggravated assault are close to flat on a 12-month basis. The direction across nearly every category is downward, even in a month where only one signal crossed the anomaly threshold.
Notable signals 1
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 127 incidents — about 24% below the 167 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 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 Washington Heights 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.”
Lower West Side
130 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 above Washington Heights's 127.
Open page →Riverdale
113 incidents over the past 12 months — 14 below Washington Heights's 127.
Open page →Logan Square
112 incidents over the past 12 months — 15 below Washington Heights's 127.
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.