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 had a narrow month — one tracked signal across all categories, with everything else running within its normal range. That single signal is a below-trend read on aggravated assault, and it sits against a broader 12-month backdrop that has been moving in the same direction.
Aggravated assault logged 129 incidents over the trailing 12 months against a prior-year total of 143, a 9.8% reduction year-over-year. Homicide is also down over the same window — 5 incidents versus 8 a year ago, a 37.5% decline — while burglary dropped 14.0% (74 vs. 86). The two categories that moved in the opposite direction, sexual assault (+52.0%, 38 vs. 25) and vandalism (+9.3%, 376 vs. 344), did not register as anomalies this month, but their 12-month totals mark them as the categories to watch in coming briefings.
Notable signals 1
Aggravated Assault
The past 12 months saw 129 incidents — about 24% below the 170 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 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 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.”
Douglas
128 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Washington Heights's 129.
Open page →Logan Square
127 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below Washington Heights's 129.
Open page →Gage Park
124 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below Washington Heights's 129.
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 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.