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 the headline of April 2026 — the sharpest single-neighborhood signal in Washington DC this briefing, and the only fresh spike at the top of the rankings. Colonial Village registered the same category move, making other-larceny the one area of upward pressure in a month otherwise defined by broad declines.
Citywide volume is down 23.5% against the prior 12 months — 21,797 incidents against 28,505 the year before. The signal mix reinforces the downward trend: 59 sustained-shift signals and 29 below-trend signals, against just 2 spikes across 41 neighborhoods. Petworth theft-from-vehicle and Mayfair aggravated assault both ran well below baseline, consistent with the dominant pattern this briefing. A streak-break in Friendship Heights homicide rounds out the top five.
With 93 total signals and the vast majority pointing downward, April continues the structural decline visible in prior months. The other-larceny cluster in Walter Reed and Colonial Village is the one category worth tracking into May — two neighborhoods moving the same direction in the same month is early, but it stands out against an otherwise quiet upper tier.
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 April 2026 briefing.
Is crime in Washington DC down?
Yes — citywide incident volume is 23.5% lower than the prior 12 months.
Across the trailing 12-month window we tracked 21,797 incidents in NIBRS-aligned categories, compared to 28,505 in the year before — down 6,708 incidents.
Is violent crime in Washington DC down?
Yes — homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, and sexual assault are down 24.2% combined in the trailing 12 months.
That's 2,408 violent incidents in the past year against 3,177 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 23.4% combined in the trailing 12 months.
That's 19,389 property incidents in the past year against 25,328 in the prior year.
What are the safest neighborhoods to stay in Washington DC?
- Saint Elizabeths — 9.1 incidents per 1,000 residents
- Spring Valley — 9.3 incidents per 1,000 residents
- Walter Reed — 12.9 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?
Ivy City — 44.2% fewer incidents than the prior 12 months.
Ivy City logged 945 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 1,695 the year before.
Which neighborhood in Washington DC saw the biggest crime increase?
Colonial Village — 54.8% more incidents than the prior 12 months.
Colonial Village logged 243 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 157 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 2023 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 | -100% | +94% | +456% | SPIKE | |
| 02 | Colonial Village | Other Larceny | -60% | +86% | +173% | SPIKE | |
| 03 | Friendship Heights | Homicide | — | — | — | STREAK BREAK | |
| 04 | Petworth | Theft from Vehicle | -33% | -39% | -47% | DROP | |
| 05 | Mayfair | Aggravated Assault | — | -38% | -47% | DROP | |
| 06 | Capitol View | Robbery | -50% | -51% | -60% | DROP | |
| 07 | Fairfax Village | Theft from Vehicle | -80% | -67% | -76% | DROP | |
| 08 | Congress Heights | Robbery | 0% | -26% | -50% | DROP | |
| 09 | Adams Morgan | Burglary | — | -63% | -66% | DROP | |
| 10 | Twining | Theft from Vehicle | +100% | -48% | -66% | DROP | |
| 11 | Barry Farm | Aggravated Assault | +100% | -35% | -48% | DROP | |
| 12 | Brookland | Burglary | -50% | -51% | -55% | DROP |
The long arc — eight years of monthly counts
Four neighborhoods worth your time
Walter Reed
The past 12 months saw 31 incidents — about 456% above the 6 average from prior years.
Read briefing →SPIKE · OTHER LARCENYColonial Village
The past 12 months saw 106 incidents — about 173% above the 39 average from prior years.
Read briefing →STREAK BREAK · HOMICIDEFriendship Heights
First incident since January 2024 — a 2-year gap ended this month.
Read briefing →DROP · THEFT FROM VEHICLEPetworth
The past 12 months saw 217 incidents — about 47% below the 408 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 April 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.