Washington DC Crime Rate — 2025 in Review
A year of crime trends, summarized.
An annual companion to the monthly briefings: the anomalies that mattered, the structural shifts that emerged, and where the model got it right (or wrong). 12 briefings, condensed.
Seven chapters
The big picture
Citywide totals + monthly volume for 2025.
The five biggest crime stories
Five distinct anomalies that defined the year.
Crime by category
All ten categories, ranked by 2025 totals.
Crime by neighborhood
Neighborhoods sorted by total tracked signals.
Crime forecast scorecard
Month-by-month forecast accuracy against actuals.
Methodology updates
Threshold + bucket changes that landed during the year.
What we'll watch in 2026
Patterns we expect to keep moving.
The big picture
Washington DC closed 2025 with 23,934 bucketed incidents — down 17.4% against 28,987 the year before. 756 tracked signals were raised across 12 briefings — 61 spikes, 665 drops + sustained shifts, and 6 rare-event / streak-break signals.
The monthly volume chart at right shows where the year was busy and where it was quiet, against the prior-year monthly average (dashed line). The categories that moved most are broken out below.
The five biggest crime stories
Five distinct anomalies we'd point a 2025reader to. Recurring (neighborhood, category) stories collapse to one card so the list isn't five copies of the same spike.
Howard University · Theft from Vehicle
The past year logged 404 incidents — down 49% from 791 the year before.
Ivy City · Theft from Vehicle
The past year logged 514 incidents — up 80% from 286 the year before.
Brookland · Other Larceny
The past year logged 332 incidents — down 42% from 572 the year before.
Walter Reed · Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 20 incidents — about 744% above the 2 average from prior years.
Edgewood · Motor Vehicle Theft
The past year logged 299 incidents — down 42% from 518 the year before.
Crime by category
All ten categories, ranked by 2025 total volume.
Crime by neighborhood
12 neighborhoods led the year by total signal count. The note column is the dominant story for that neighborhood — its biggest single signal.
Crime forecast scorecard
Of 96 monthly point-estimate forecasts issued for 2025, 66 (69%) landed inside their 95% prediction intervals. Below: month by month.
Per-bucket coverage, MAPE, and bias details live on the methodology page.
Methodology updates
Logged inline with the code that runs the model.
- VIEW DETAIL →
10-bucket NIBRS-aligned categories
Replaced an earlier 6-bucket scheme (which collapsed homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, and sexual assault into one “violent” bucket). Each bucket now maps to FBI UCR Part 1 / NIBRS Group A — the cross-city common denominator for adding new cities.
- VIEW DETAIL →
Sustained-shift Poisson rate-ratio test
Added a Poisson Z-test (|Z|>2.576, ratio differs by ≥25%) for sustained shifts between recent vs prior 12-mo windows — distinct from the spike/drop signals which compare against the multi-year baseline.
- VIEW DETAIL →
Prophet forecasts with low-count gating
Per-(neighborhood, bucket) forecasts now skip cells averaging <2 incidents/month over the trailing 24 months. Violent-bucket forecasts skip at the neighborhood level and surface via rare-event / streak-break signals instead.
What we'll watch in 2026
3 distinct patterns from 2025we expect to keep moving — drawn from the year's recurring sustained signals, not the single-month spikes already covered above.
- 01
Walter Reed · other larceny
The past 12 months saw 27 incidents — about 437% above the 5 average from prior years. Surfaced in 8 of 2025's 12 briefings — the persistence is what puts it on the watch list.
- 02
Cleveland Park · other larceny
The past year logged 299 incidents — down 37% from 476 the year before.
- 03
Twining · robbery
The past year logged 66 incidents — down 57% from 155 the year before.
Cite as: Public Analyst.ai, “Washington DC — 2025in review,” auto-generated annual report. Permanent URL: /dc/2025/year-in-review.