West Elsdon Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
West Elsdon is a Southwest Side residential neighborhood between Pulaski Road and Cicero Avenue, organized around 55th Street. Predominantly single-family bungalows on a tight grid, bordered by the Stevenson Expressway and the Brighton Park neighborhood.
March 2026 was a quiet month in West Elsdon — no tracked category crossed an anomaly threshold, and the signal count was zero across all flag types. The structural picture visible in the 12-month totals is the more meaningful story here.
Robbery is down 51.4% against the prior 12 months, 18 incidents vs 37. Burglary fell 31.6% (26 vs 38) and aggravated assault dropped 24.0% (38 vs 50). Motor vehicle theft is down 21.6% as well. Other larceny and vandalism are both near flat year-over-year — down 7.1% and up 1.9% respectively — while sexual assault held even at 9 incidents. No category moved enough in March to register as a sustained shift or a single-month signal, but the broad direction across violent and property categories over the trailing 12 months is consistently downward.
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 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 West Elsdon 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.”
Oakland
166 incidents over the past 12 months — 10 above West Elsdon's 156.
Open page →Avalon Park
173 incidents over the past 12 months — 17 above West Elsdon's 156.
Open page →Hegewisch
135 incidents over the past 12 months — 21 below West Elsdon's 156.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for West Elsdon, 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.