Washington DC Crime Rate Trends
Data sourced from the Metropolitan Police Department of DC (MPD) Open Data portal and analyzed by Public Analyst.ai: 41 neighborhoods, 8 incident categories, twelve months of trailing comparison. Browse the rankings, scan the multi-year trends, or open a neighborhood-level breakdown.
Walter Reed other larceny is up 354% against its multi-year baseline, the largest single-category move in Washington DC this month and the first time this neighborhood has topped the briefing rankings. Colonial Village registered the same category in the same direction, giving other larceny a notable two-neighborhood footprint in this briefing.
Citywide volume is down 20.4% against the prior 12 months, 21,185 incidents against 26,604. The signal mix skews heavily toward sustained declines: 58 sustained-shift signals and 25 below-trend signals across 41 neighborhoods, set against just 4 fresh spikes. Chevy Chase DC appears twice in the top five, motor vehicle theft and other larceny both moving up, while Petworth theft from vehicle ran in the opposite direction.
The two other-larceny spikes in Walter Reed and Colonial Village are the signals most worth tracking into October. The broader citywide picture remains a long decline: 89 total signals this month, with sustained downward shifts accounting for the majority. If the Walter Reed and Colonial Village moves hold next month, the category becomes a structural story; for now, this is a single-month read on an otherwise declining trend.
Washington DC Crime Frequently Asked Questions
Trailing 12 months vs the prior 12 months, computed from the same NIBRS-aligned categories used everywhere else on the page. Updated each September 2026 briefing.
Is crime in Washington DC down?
Yes. Citywide incident volume is 20.4% lower than the prior 12 months.
Across the trailing 12-month window we tracked 21,185 incidents in NIBRS-aligned categories, compared to 26,604 in the year before, down 5,419 incidents.
Is violent crime in Washington DC down?
Yes. Homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, and sexual assault are down 1.6% combined in the trailing 12 months.
That's 2,664 violent incidents in the past year against 2,707 in the prior year. See the by-category section below for the per-bucket breakdown.
Is property crime in Washington DC down?
Yes. Burglary, theft from vehicle, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson are down 22.5% combined in the trailing 12 months.
That's 18,521 property incidents in the past year against 23,897 in the prior year.
What are the safest neighborhoods to stay in Washington DC?
- Spring Valley — 7.8 incidents per 1,000 residents
- Saint Elizabeths — 10.2 incidents per 1,000 residents
- Walter Reed — 12.2 incidents per 1,000 residents
The three safest neighborhoods in Washington DC, ranked by trailing-12-month incidents per 1,000 residents.
Computed as NIBRS-aligned trailing-12-month incident totals divided by the latest ACS 5-year residential population, expressed per 1,000 residents. Restricted to neighborhoods with at least 1,000 residents so park-only and industrial geographies, where visitor populations are not reflected in the residential denominator, are excluded.
Which neighborhood in Washington DC saw the biggest crime drop?
Navy Yard: 44.1% fewer incidents than the prior 12 months.
Navy Yard logged 340 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 608 the year before.
Which neighborhood in Washington DC saw the biggest crime increase?
Georgetown: 9.0% more incidents than the prior 12 months.
Georgetown logged 639 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 586 the year before.
The denominators behind the numbers
Federal district at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers, bordered by Maryland on three sides and Virginia across the Potomac. The L'Enfant Plan organizes the city around the U.S. Capitol with four cardinal quadrants (NW, NE, SW, SE) overlaid by diagonal avenues named for states. Rock Creek cuts a forested ravine through the western half of the city, splitting upper-Northwest neighborhoods from the rest of the grid.
ACS 2024 5-year estimates, county-level (District of Columbia, FIPS 11001). DC is a single county-equivalent jurisdiction, so the county and city are coterminous — these aggregates describe the same population the police data covers.
City-level only. We deliberately do not juxtapose these with neighborhood-level crime data — see the methodology for why.
DC is small and dense by US-city standards, with a footprint roughly the size of Boston and a transit-served core that stretches from upper-Northwest down through the Capitol to the Anacostia waterfront. The grid is broken in three places by significant green space: Rock Creek Park bisects the west, the Anacostia divides the city's east from its center, and the National Mall plus Arboretum together remove a wide diagonal from the buildable area. Neighborhood density falls off sharply east of the Anacostia and in the upper-Northwest single-family belts.
MPD publishes incident-level data through DC's ArcGIS Hub portal as per-calendar-year layers (Crime Incidents - 2018 through current year), updated daily. The public feed is Part 1 index crimes only (homicide, sex abuse, robbery, assault with a dangerous weapon, burglary, theft, theft from auto, motor vehicle theft); Part 2 offenses including simple assault, vandalism, drug offenses, and arson are not exposed in this dataset and are excluded from the platform's analysis at the city page level. Sex abuse counts in the feed are typically low and capture aggregate sex-offense reports rather than the granular sub-categories that NIBRS-coded cities expose.
Every neighborhood, color-coded
Largest moves this month
| # | Neighborhood | Category | MoM | YoY 12mo | vs baseline | 90-day trend | Signal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Walter Reed | Other Larceny | -33% | +20% | +354% | SPIKE | |
| 02 | Chevy Chase DC | Motor Vehicle Theft | +125% | +310% | +106% | SPIKE | |
| 03 | Colonial Village | Other Larceny | 0% | +13% | +130% | SPIKE | |
| 04 | Chevy Chase DC | Other Larceny | -65% | +67% | +67% | SPIKE | |
| 05 | Petworth | Theft from Vehicle | -23% | -11% | -38% | DROP | |
| 06 | Deanwood | Robbery | -40% | -40% | -55% | DROP | |
| 07 | Woodridge | Robbery | — | -33% | -72% | DROP | |
| 08 | Brookland | Theft from Vehicle | -20% | -40% | -54% | DROP | |
| 09 | Adams Morgan | Burglary | -100% | -30% | -60% | DROP | |
| 10 | Mayfair | Theft from Vehicle | +100% | -59% | -72% | DROP | |
| 11 | Fairfax Village | Theft from Vehicle | -17% | -41% | -70% | DROP | |
| 12 | Capitol Hill | Robbery | +500% | -54% | -75% | DROP |
The long arc — eight years of monthly counts
Four neighborhoods worth your time
Walter Reed
The past 12 months saw 30 incidents — about 354% above the 7 average from prior years.
Read briefing →SPIKE · MOTOR VEHICLE THEFTChevy Chase DC
The past 12 months saw 41 incidents — about 106% above the 20 average from prior years.
Read briefing →SPIKE · OTHER LARCENYColonial Village
The past 12 months saw 94 incidents — about 130% above the 41 average from prior years.
Read briefing →SPIKE · OTHER LARCENYChevy Chase DC
The past 12 months saw 122 incidents — about 67% above the 73 average from prior years.
Read briefing →Hour-of-day, day-of-week, and seasonality
Distribution of bucketed incidents citywide 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.
All 41 Washington DC neighborhoods
Crime rate trends and September 2026 briefings for every tracked neighborhood. Alphabetical.
- Adams Morgan crime rate
- Barry Farm crime rate
- Brookland crime rate
- Capitol Hill crime rate
- Capitol View crime rate
- Chevy Chase DC crime rate
- Cleveland Park crime rate
- Colonial Village crime rate
- Columbia Heights crime rate
- Congress Heights crime rate
- Deanwood crime rate
- Douglas crime rate
- Downtown crime rate
- Dupont Circle crime rate
- Eastland Gardens crime rate
- Edgewood crime rate
- Fairfax Village crime rate
- Foggy Bottom crime rate
- Fort Stanton crime rate
- Fort Totten crime rate
- Friendship Heights crime rate
- Georgetown crime rate
- Glover Park crime rate
- Historic Anacostia crime rate
- Howard University crime rate
- Ivy City crime rate
- Mayfair crime rate
- Navy Yard crime rate
- North Cleveland Park crime rate
- North Michigan Park crime rate
- Petworth crime rate
- River Terrace crime rate
- Saint Elizabeths crime rate
- Shaw crime rate
- Southwest Waterfront crime rate
- Spring Valley crime rate
- Takoma crime rate
- Twining crime rate
- Union Station crime rate
- Walter Reed crime rate
- Woodridge crime rate
How We Calculate Washington DC Crime Trends
Open about how we define spikes, what we exclude as noise, where the data comes from, and how often the model is wrong.