West Ridge Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
West Ridge — also known as West Rogers Park — is a Far North Side neighborhood organized around the Devon Avenue commercial corridor between Western Avenue and California Avenue. Predominantly two- and three-flat housing, bordered by Evanston to the north and Rogers Park to the east.
West Ridge had a narrow month, just two tracked signals, one below-trend and one structural. The standout is a single-month drop in robbery, the strongest signal in the neighborhood this period. Alongside it, sexual assault registers as a sustained shift downward, a pattern that reflects multi-year movement rather than a quiet month.
Robbery is down 36.2% over the trailing 12 months, 51 incidents against 80 in the prior year. Sexual assault follows a similar direction, 28 incidents in the current 12 months versus 52 in the year before, a 46.2% reduction that spans well beyond a single reporting period. Every other tracked category, including aggravated assault, other larceny, and motor vehicle theft, ran within its normal range, leaving the story of September 2026 concentrated in these two categories moving lower.
Notable signals 1
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 51 incidents — about 52% below the 107 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.
- Sexual Assault has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 28, down 46% from 52 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 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 Ridge 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.”
Douglas
50 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below West Ridge's 51.
Open page →Washington Heights
50 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below West Ridge's 51.
Open page →Washington Park
49 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 below West Ridge's 51.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for West Ridge, 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.