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 April 2026 — two categories moved, and both ran downward. One registered as a single-month below-trend signal (robbery), the other as a structural multi-month shift (motor vehicle theft). The overall shape is a modest but consistent pullback across two distinct crime types.
Robbery's trailing 12-month total stands at 25 incidents, down from 38 the prior year — a 34.2% decline against a baseline that had been running closer to 45 per year. Motor vehicle theft shows the same direction as a sustained shift: 147 incidents over the current 12 months against 241 in the prior period, a 39.0% reduction. Every other tracked category, including burglary, vandalism, and other larceny, came in within its normal range this month.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 25 incidents — about 45% 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 147, down 39% from 241 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 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.”
Hermosa
26 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above West Lawn's 25.
Open page →Archer Heights
23 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below West Lawn's 25.
Open page →Bridgeport
23 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below West Lawn's 25.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
West Lawndoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Sexual assault | 3 | — too few |
| Motor vehicle theft | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows West Lawn's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 6 adjacent neighborhoods spiked the same category within the next 3 months. A high same-category rate suggests a shock that travels (e.g. theft crews moving across Chicago); a low rate means spikes here tend to be local to the neighborhood. Categories with fewer than 5 historical spike events are listed but their rates are suppressed.
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 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.