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.
August 2026 brought a single signal in Woodlawn: a sustained multi-month shift in motor vehicle theft, not a one-month anomaly but a structural change embedded in the trailing 12-month window. Every other tracked category held within its normal range.
Motor vehicle theft is up 29.5% against the prior 12 months, 356 incidents vs. 275 in the year before, and the sustained-shift classification means this gap has persisted long enough to reflect a changed baseline, not a noisy month. Aggravated assault and sexual assault both ran in the other direction, down 13.5% and 13.2% respectively over the same window, and burglary and vandalism both rose modestly on the 12-month measure but produced no anomaly signal of their own. The month's picture is narrow: one structural problem category against an otherwise stable backdrop.
Notable signals 0
Nothing notable surfaced this month — every category sits within normal range against its baseline.
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 356, up 30% from 275 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 August 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 motor vehicle theft 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 motor vehicle theft levels.”
Englewood
344 incidents over the past 12 months — 12 below Woodlawn's 356.
Open page →West Englewood
340 incidents over the past 12 months — 16 below Woodlawn's 356.
Open page →South Chicago
338 incidents over the past 12 months — 18 below Woodlawn's 356.
Open page →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.