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 registered one tracked signal in April 2026 — a below-trend month for aggravated assault. The rest of the tracked categories were within normal range, making this a narrow, single-category briefing rather than a broad shift.
Aggravated assault sits at 127 incidents over the current 12-month window, down 11.8% against the prior year's 144 and running below a multi-year baseline of 169.49. Sexual assault moved in the other direction on an annual basis — 35 incidents versus 24 the prior year, a 45.8% rise — though it did not cross the threshold for a tracked signal this month. Robbery and burglary both continued their year-over-year declines, at -16.7% and -16.9% respectively, without generating fresh signals of their own.
Notable signals 1
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 127 incidents — about 25% below the 169 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 April 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.”
Gage Park
126 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Washington Heights's 127.
Open page →Lower West Side
131 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above Washington Heights's 127.
Open page →Douglas
122 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 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.