Woodlawn Crime Rate Trends — Chicago
Woodlawn is a South Side neighborhood organized around 63rd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, bordered by the University of Chicago to the north and the Jackson Park Historic District to the east. Anchored by the Obama Presidential Center site, the Metra Electric line, and the Midway Plaisance park.
Two categories moved in Woodlawn this June — one a single-month spike, one a structural multi-month shift. That's a narrow month by volume, but the two signals pull in the same direction: property crime is running above where it was a year ago, and in two distinct ways.
Other larceny registered the month's spike, with 815 incidents over the trailing 12 months against a baseline of 576.91 — a gap that makes this month's reading the clearest above-trend signal. Motor vehicle theft carries the sustained-shift signal: 348 incidents over the current 12 months against 270 in the prior period, up 28.9% year over year and holding elevated long enough to read as structural rather than noise. Robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and sexual assault all ran below their prior-year levels, and homicide's 12-month count — 11 versus 8 — was not among the tracked signals this month.
Notable signals 1
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 815 incidents — about 41% above the 577 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 is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 348, up 29% from 270 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through June 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 Woodlawn compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny 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 other larceny levels.”
Gage Park
793 incidents over the past 12 months — 22 below Woodlawn's 815.
Open page →Rogers Park
840 incidents over the past 12 months — 25 above Woodlawn's 815.
Open page →North Lawndale
777 incidents over the past 12 months — 38 below Woodlawn's 815.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Woodlawndoesn'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 |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Woodlawn's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 4 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 Woodlawn, 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.