West Town Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
West Town is a West Side neighborhood that includes Wicker Park, Bucktown, the Ukrainian Village, and Noble Square, organized around Milwaukee, Damen, and North Avenues. Anchored by the historic Flatiron Building at the Milwaukee-Damen-North six-corners and the Bloomingdale Trail (the 606).
Four categories moved in West Town this September, a mix of one single-month drop, one single-month spike, and two sustained structural shifts. The overall shape is uneven: robbery is pulling sharply lower on both short and long timelines, while sexual assault is moving in the opposite direction.
Robbery is the clearest structural story, down 60.7% over the trailing 12 months, 94 incidents against 239 in the prior year, and the sustained-shift signal confirms this is not a one-month fluctuation. Sexual assault is the counter-signal: 90 incidents in the current 12 months against 74 in the prior year, a 21.6% rise, and the single-month spike indicates the recent pace is running above even that elevated trend. Everything else, burglary, aggravated assault, motor vehicle theft, vandalism, and other larceny, landed within its normal range for the month.
Notable signals 2
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 90 incidents — about 38% above the 65 average from prior years.
Robbery
The past 12 months saw 94 incidents — about 72% below the 336 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 94, down 61% from 239 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 184, down 37% from 292 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 Town compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month sexual assault 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 sexual assault levels.”
Uptown
83 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 below West Town's 90.
Open page →South Shore
98 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 above West Town's 90.
Open page →Lake View
99 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 above West Town's 90.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
West Towndoesn'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 | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows West Town'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 Town, 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.