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.
The freshest signal this month is a homicide rare-event in Cleveland Park — a neighborhood that had gone without a tracked homicide signal until this period. Walter Reed's other-larceny pattern has been the persistent backdrop, topping the category rankings last month, but the category itself is the recurring story this briefing: other-larceny spikes appeared in both Walter Reed and Colonial Village, shifting the lead away from any single neighborhood and toward a broader category move.
Citywide volume is down 25.2% against the prior 12 months — 21,066 incidents against 28,172 the year before. The signal mix is heavily weighted toward sustained declines: 62 sustained-shift signals and 27 below-trend signals across 41 neighborhoods, with just 2 fresh spikes in the top rankings. Colonial Village stands out for appearing twice in the top five, with both an other-larceny spike and an aggravated assault streak break. Petworth theft-from-vehicle ran below trend, one of the quieter moves in an otherwise active month for signals.
The structural decline in Washington DC volume is now well-established across multiple months. The two streak breaks — Cleveland Park homicide and Colonial Village aggravated assault — are worth tracking, since streak breaks indicate categories that had been running below baseline and have now returned to or above it. Neither is a multi-month trend yet; this is the first month either appears at this level in the rankings.
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 June 2026 briefing.
Is crime in Washington DC down?
Yes — citywide incident volume is 25.2% lower than the prior 12 months.
Across the trailing 12-month window we tracked 21,066 incidents in NIBRS-aligned categories, compared to 28,172 in the year before — down 7,106 incidents.
Is violent crime in Washington DC down?
Yes — homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, and sexual assault are down 17.6% combined in the trailing 12 months.
That's 2,471 violent incidents in the past year against 2,999 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 26.1% combined in the trailing 12 months.
That's 18,595 property incidents in the past year against 25,173 in the prior year.
What are the safest neighborhoods to stay in Washington DC?
- Saint Elizabeths — 8.8 incidents per 1,000 residents
- Spring Valley — 8.9 incidents per 1,000 residents
- Walter Reed — 12.0 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 — 47.4% fewer incidents than the prior 12 months.
Navy Yard logged 347 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 660 the year before.
Which neighborhood in Washington DC saw the biggest crime increase?
Colonial Village — 23.8% more incidents than the prior 12 months.
Colonial Village logged 224 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 181 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 | +50% | +38% | +386% | SPIKE | |
| 02 | Colonial Village | Other Larceny | -67% | +39% | +151% | SPIKE | |
| 03 | Cleveland Park | Homicide | — | — | — | STREAK BREAK | |
| 04 | Colonial Village | Aggravated Assault | — | — | — | STREAK BREAK | |
| 05 | Petworth | Theft from Vehicle | -29% | -38% | -51% | DROP | |
| 06 | Capitol View | Robbery | +50% | -44% | -59% | DROP | |
| 07 | Fairfax Village | Theft from Vehicle | 0% | -63% | -76% | DROP | |
| 08 | Adams Morgan | Burglary | 0% | -54% | -63% | DROP | |
| 09 | Deanwood | Robbery | -60% | -55% | -52% | DROP | |
| 10 | Woodridge | Robbery | — | -55% | -65% | DROP | |
| 11 | Congress Heights | Robbery | +120% | -29% | -50% | DROP | |
| 12 | Twining | Theft from Vehicle | -20% | -44% | -67% | DROP |
The long arc — eight years of monthly counts
Four neighborhoods worth your time
Walter Reed
The past 12 months saw 29 incidents — about 386% above the 6 average from prior years.
Read briefing →SPIKE · OTHER LARCENYColonial Village
The past 12 months saw 99 incidents — about 151% above the 39 average from prior years.
Read briefing →STREAK BREAK · HOMICIDECleveland Park
First incident since May 2022 — a 4-year gap ended this month.
Read briefing →STREAK BREAK · AGGRAVATED ASSAULTColonial Village
First incident since March 2024 — a 2-year gap ended this month.
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 June 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.