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 signals surfaced in West Garfield Park this April — one single-month below-trend move and two sustained structural shifts. The shape is narrow but consistent: robbery and aggravated assault are both running lower across multiple timeframes, not just a single quiet month.
Robbery is the clearest case. The trailing 12-month total of 132 is down 25.8% against the prior year's 178, and the sustained-shift signal confirms this isn't a one-month dip. Aggravated Assault tells a similar story — 247 incidents over the current 12 months against 334 in the year prior, a 26.0% reduction that also registers as a structural shift. Everything else in the neighborhood landed within its normal range this period.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 132 incidents — about 45% below the 242 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.
- Aggravated Assault has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 247, down 26% from 334 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Robbery has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 132, down 26% from 178 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
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 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
133 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above West Garfield Park's 132.
Open page →Lake View
137 incidents over the past 12 months — 5 above West Garfield Park's 132.
Open page →West Town
124 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 below West Garfield Park's 132.
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.