West Lawn Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
West Lawn is a Southwest Side residential neighborhood between Pulaski Road and Cicero Avenue, organized around 63rd Street. Predominantly single-family bungalows; includes the Marquette Park golf course and the Ford City Mall to the south.
West Lawn had a narrow month — two categories moved, one a single-month below-trend signal and one a structural multi-year shift. The pattern is not broad, but both signals point the same direction: downward.
Robbery registered a one-month drop, with the current 12-month total at 26 incidents against a prior-year total of 39 — down 33.3% year-over-year. Motor vehicle theft is the deeper story: a sustained shift now reflects structural decline, with 153 incidents over the trailing 12 months versus 248 the year before, a 38.3% reduction. Every other tracked category — aggravated assault aside, which is up 32.7% year-over-year to 69 incidents — remained within range and produced no signals this month.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 26 incidents — about 43% below the 46 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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 153, down 38% from 248 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 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 Lawn 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.”
Lincoln Square
27 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above West Lawn's 26.
Open page →Archer Heights
24 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below West Lawn's 26.
Open page →Calumet Heights
28 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above West Lawn's 26.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for West Lawn, 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.