West Garfield Park Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
West Garfield Park is a West Side neighborhood organized around Garfield Park itself, bordered by the Eisenhower Expressway and the historic Madison Street commercial corridor. Anchored by the Garfield Park Conservatory, the CTA Green Line's Conservatory station, and the Pulaski commercial strip.
Three categories moved in West Garfield Park this September, a relatively contained month. The dominant signal is robbery, which registered both a one-month below-trend reading and a multi-month structural shift downward, two distinct signals pointing the same direction. Motor vehicle theft is the counterweight, with a sustained shift upward that has now persisted across multiple months.
Robbery stands out most sharply: 111 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 168 in the prior year, a 33.9% reduction. Motor vehicle theft moved the other way, 266 incidents in the current 12 months versus 209 in the year before, a 27.3% rise that the sustained-shift classification marks as structural rather than a one-month fluctuation. Everything else in the neighborhood, aggravated assault, burglary, vandalism, and the rest, fell within normal range this month.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 111 incidents — about 53% below the 238 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.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 111, down 34% from 168 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Motor Vehicle Theft is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 266, up 27% from 209 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
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 West Garfield Park compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month robbery 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 robbery levels.”
Auburn Gresham
107 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below West Garfield Park's 111.
Open page →Englewood
115 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 above West Garfield Park's 111.
Open page →West Englewood
106 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 below West Garfield Park's 111.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for West Garfield Park, 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.