Adams Morgan Crime Rate Trends — Washington DC
Adams Morgan is a dense Northwest neighborhood centered on the 18th Street nightlife and restaurant strip, just east of Rock Creek Park and north of Dupont Circle. The cluster also covers the quieter residential streets of Lanier Heights and Kalorama Heights, where rowhouses and pre-war apartment buildings step up from the commercial spine.
Two categories moved in Adams Morgan this August briefing. Burglary registered a one-month below-trend signal, and motor vehicle theft has shifted structurally downward over the trailing 12 months. The rest of the tracked categories were within range.
Burglary stands out as the stronger of the two signals: the current 12-month total is 15 incidents against 24 in the prior 12 months, a 37.5% reduction year-over-year. Motor vehicle theft tells a similar story at the structural level, 28 incidents in the current 12 months versus 61 in the year before, down 54.1%, pointing to a multi-year shift rather than a single quiet month. Robbery and aggravated assault both ran higher year-over-year, 38.9% and 27.3% respectively, but neither crossed an anomaly threshold this month.
Notable signals 1
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 15 incidents — about 57% below the 35 average from prior years.
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.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 28, down 54% from 61 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through August 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.
Burglary
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
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.
Theft from Vehicle
How Adams Morgan compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month burglary 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 burglary levels.”
Barry Farm
14 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Adams Morgan's 15.
Open page →River Terrace
14 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 below Adams Morgan's 15.
Open page →Downtown
17 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Adams Morgan's 15.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Adams Morgan, 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 DC Open Data — MPD's per-year Crime Incidents layers on the DCGIS ArcGIS Hub — mapped to 8 UCR Part 1 categories (vandalism and arson are not exposed in MPD's public feed and are excluded). The feed covers 2018-current and updates daily. Aggregated to neighborhood cluster × category × month, with each cluster page identified by its colloquial lead constituent (Adams Morgan, Petworth, Capitol Hill, etc.) rather than the numbered 'Cluster N' identifier.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.