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 tracked signals surfaced in West Garfield Park this August, one below-trend single-month move and two structural shifts that point to longer patterns rather than a single noisy month. The shape is mixed: robbery is pulling down hard on both a monthly and multi-year basis, while motor vehicle theft is moving in the opposite direction at the structural level.
Robbery is the clearest story. The trailing 12-month total is 115 incidents against 170 in the prior year, a 32.4% decline, and the sustained-shift signal confirms this is a multi-year structural move, not a one-month artifact. Motor vehicle theft cuts the other way: 260 incidents in the current 12 months against 201 in the prior year, up 29.4%, and also registering as a sustained shift. Aggravated assault and other categories were within range this month, leaving the briefing defined by those two opposing structural currents.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 115 incidents — about 52% 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 115, down 32% from 170 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 260, up 29% from 201 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 August 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.”
Englewood
112 incidents over the past 12 months — 3 below West Garfield Park's 115.
Open page →Auburn Gresham
107 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 below West Garfield Park's 115.
Open page →West Englewood
105 incidents over the past 12 months — 10 below West Garfield Park's 115.
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.