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.
September 2026 produced no tracked signals in Woodlawn. No category crossed the threshold for a spike, drop, sustained shift, or rare event this month, making it a structurally flat period against the multi-year baseline.
The 12-month totals tell a mixed picture beneath that calm surface. Motor vehicle theft is up 21.1% against the prior year, 350 incidents vs. 289, and vandalism rose 13.9% to 501 incidents. On the other side, sexual assault is down 32.6% over the same window, 29 incidents vs. 43, and aggravated assault fell 11.5% to 239. None of these moves generated a signal this month, but the property crime categories trending upward over 12 months are worth watching in the periods ahead.
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.
No sustained shifts surfaced this month.
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 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.”
North Lawndale
811 incidents over the past 12 months — 8 above Woodlawn's 803.
Open page →Gage Park
812 incidents over the past 12 months — 9 above Woodlawn's 803.
Open page →Roseland
780 incidents over the past 12 months — 23 below Woodlawn's 803.
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.